Conceptual essay -- Annabel

Subject:

How can students gain understanding through exploration? Can new literacies; digital and traditional research; journaling, bookmaking and timelines; development of language arts skills; and various arts and media be integrated in the exploratory learning process?

final essay

Sorry I haven't posted sooner about my topic.

As someone who is pretty novice about technology and why it is important to use it in our classrooms I have been exploring why it is important for me to learn about all these new technologies and how they benefit the student.  Also not only am I exploring the technology itself but what else students are learning by incorporating certain technologies into the classroom.  The reason I find this topic important for me is that the one and only class room I have been in the teacher used no technology because she didn't want to learn about technology and I can see how there was something missing in her class and I don't want that to be me since I too don't really know that much about technology.

Conceptual Essay Summary- Tania and Daisy

Daisy and I will be focussing our paper on blogging. Blogging is a new literacy that allows children and adults from all over the world to communicate with each other. It is considered a form of social media that allows children to use their writing, reading, and typing skills to interact by discussing topics at hand and posing questions/answers. Our goal is to encourage the use of blogging in an early childhood setting. We will pose ideas and strategies on how blogging can be utilized. The articles we have decided to use are based on the positive effects blogging has on the students. 

Conceptual Essay Topic - Rosanna

In my final essay, I will explore how identity is created and formed in online affinity spaces, which are spaces online where people with a shared interest or purpose go to discuss, share, interact, or create ideas and artifacts related to their interest.  That said, in the scope of my paper, spaces such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are excluded because they either more operate first as spaces where friends unite to share things about their personal lives (although they do divert to subspaces about interests and purposes) or because they are too general in scope, as with YouTube.  The spaces to be explored in my paper will include spaces centered on a specific interest or activity where members actively participate around it, such as AnimeMusicVideo.org, where they create artifacts that they all can enjoy, critique, and assist each other with, or certain gaming sites, where they interact and compete with each other.

I will explore the activities that members perform in these spaces that facilitate the creation and formation of identity, with a focus on the types of identities they create the interactions and activities they perform to establish their identities there and attain certain levels of expertise or social status, and their behaviors there, which may or may not mirror their behaviors in the real world.  I will finally explore how these activities, including online gaming, and the cognitive processes that occur, mirror and even transcend those that educators struggle to teach every day in their classrooms and how these authentic experiences that our students perform voluntarily every day can be tapped into, mirrored, or transferred into classroom settings and activities.

Conceptual Essay Topic - Diana and Shannon

Social Media, specifically Blogs, Twitter, and Wikis, when used in educational settings, allows for many opportunities to educate students about how to successfully participate in online communication.  However, many states, districts, schools and teachers are subject to rules that limit these opportunities.  Diana and I will be exploring the use of social media in the classroom, focusing on the difference between rules and laws that simply prohibit usage and projects and lessons that serve to educate and guide participation in social media platforms.  We will explore projects that represent a balance between rules that protect and opportunities to engage in communicating via social media.

Final Conceptal Essay Idea

For the final concepual essay, Saira and I are going to continue the topic of bullying, but focus on how technology has made bullying and teasing more accessible and has seeped its way from the playground to homes after school hours.  The old adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is obsolete in this media filled world.  Purposeful and repeated bullying behaviors occur behind screens, where the bully no longer has to see the immediate reaction of his/her victim.  Cyberbullying can take form through text messages, e-mails, and social networking sites.  If messages are sent through a form of technology, the words meant to hurt just one person can now be seen by the public. 

In addition to the increase of bullying through electronic communication, we want to research how technology has also changed the way peer interactions and relationships are formed.  It is a rare scene to see children running around the neighborhood with friends, instead many children are meeting friends by playing games online or through game consoles that require multiple players.  We want to see how these peer relationships differ and whether or not it affects students in their learning evironment. 
-Christine & Saira

Conceptual Essay Summary-Tana

I have decided to write my final paper on the topic of collaboration and the difference between the type of voluntary collaboration that takes place outside the classroom as in the use of wikis versus school based collaborative projects.   No one tells individuals to participate in wikipedia revisions; they are voluntary.  Conversely, in-school projects are handled differently by teachers and thought of differently by students.  In my middle school classroom,  if I assign a group project, collaboration is often mandatory.   When given the option, some students will choose to work independently.  Even in our MEDI503 class, only a few people chose to work together on their final paper.

I would like to explore how to bring the type of voluntary collaboration one sees outside the classroom into the classroom.  What needs to be changed about the nature of the assignment or the parameters set around the assignment to make students voluntarily want to collaborate?