Blog Assignment 2

Did You Know? 3.0 – A John Strange 2012 Version
     So many facts! That was my first thought when I finished watching the original video. In Dr. Strange's version, there were way less facts and they were centered mostly around the students of EDM310. The video made sense to me, and Dr. Strange did a great job, but while watching it I couldn't help but notice all the things that needed fixed in the video. The title bar was cut in half on many slides and the slides were going too fast to read everything that was written on them.
Besides those few problems, I found the information in the video to be very interesting and will more then likely find it useful later on in the semester as we need information about technology for this class.

Mr. Winkle Wakes
     Mr. Winkle Wakes shows that technology has come a long way in 100 years. It is present everywhere now, including hospitals, offices, libraries, and school. In the video it says that school is just the way he remembered it with students sitting there taking notes while the teacher lectured on and on. But, to me that is just not the case anymore. While teachers do still make you take notes while they lecture they have also begun to make the classroom and interactive place.
     The teachers in my high school were learning about the SMARTboard by my first semester of Junior year (2007) and by the second semester there were already SMARTboards being brought into our school for teachers to start using. And yes, while there were still some teachers that opposed it and thought that things should stay the same as they have always been, those same teachers were loving the ease at which they could lecture by the time my graduation rolled around in the spring of 2009. I think that this is the way schools should be now simply because they should stay with the times.

 The Importance of Creativity
Sir Robinson wants everyone to know that the schools now a days are killing student creativity. All schools worry about are the "fundamentals" of Math, Science, Language Arts, and Social Studies. Everything outside of this, like dance and art, are pushed to the back and made to seem unimportant. He tells stories of his son and friends doing things that would be considered creative and how people are too scared to be creative in today's society since to be creative a lot of the times you have to be wrong.
     I believe every word of what Sir Ken Robinson said about the schools pushing creavitity out and society being afraid to be wrong simply because I am the same way. I grew up as the quiet child that did nothing but study what the teachers told her to. I never played make believe games with my friends for real and always had a book in my hand. I see now that it was wrong for me to be like that and it killed the creative side of my childhood, but luckily I am making up for it in my life now.

21st Century Learning



The main arguments made in this video include passive sitting, and memorization. For the passive sitting, students in school have a tendency to get bored and so they will sit there and daydream or hold quiet conversations with the other people sitting around them. The biggest way students learn in schools most of the time is memorization. They open their books or their computer assignments and just keep repeating the information on there until it is burned into their brains.
To keep students from “learning” this way they should be taught in an interactive way and they can get that with the technology that was shown in this video. There was an interesting game that let them explore Rome as it used to be as an example of how they can learn with it.

Vicki Davis: Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts   
     Ms. Davis' class reminds me a lot of this class. The students are teaching her at the same time that they are teaching themselves and their class mates and it is all on the computer. They reach out to students all around the world, and if you remember, Dr. Strange showed us on the first day of class that people from all around the world have looked at our class blog and student blogs.
     I think that Ms. Davis' idea of having everything online is a good thing and that it is teaching the students how to learn things on their own, and that it will be their responsibility and their mistake if the work isn't done on time or correctly, although she does still offer them some help and advice.