Skype, The Savior of the Tipping Point?

For my PLN Response I did a response to Mr. Fisch's article "H1N1, Skype, and a Possible Tipping Point" What this article talks about is how some students are you Skype to stay up to date with there assignments and class work while they are home sick. When I read this article it made me think mainly about myself because when I was sick I went to check what I missed on that day. But then I read the article again and started thinking deeper. When I was sick I just went onto the school website and checked the little bit of work I missed and that was the end of it. These kids have been out for days or possibly even a week or so with stuff like swine flu or different flu’s like it. These kids had tons of work to make up so instead of checking the school website they go to Skype to try to talk to there teachers about the work they missed. When I thought about it, this seemed like a lot more affective method of getting to your teacher than going on the website. Think about it; what if your teacher hasn’t updated there page yet or doesn’t have all of the work they did in class on it. Then what? With Skype you can easily just send a message or even IM your teacher to find the work. So this might just save you from a zero or something.

Later in the article, Mr. Fisch talks about how if H1N1 gets any worse and if the outbreak could cause a lot more absences in schools, if people will start posting instructions on the Internet on what to do and how to stay healthy. This kind of goes back to Skype. When you think about it Skype and other social networks would be great places to post these instructions. Almost every teenager these days either has a Myspace or a Facebook, so what better way to get people to know what to do? This could be something that could save us from the tipping point of this epidemic. And I’m sure that people would read it because nobody wants to get sick. Posting something like a way to avoid getting H1N1 or any sickness on a social network would get the attention of kids a lot faster than Yahoo or on the News. These are my thoughts on Mr. Fisch's article "H1N1, Skype, and a Possible Tipping Point."

Think, Find, Move On

For my education PLN response I read “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” posted by Mr. Fisch. This article is about 5th graders from East Elementary who had to watch Obama's speech, blog about it, then have a discussion on it. This really made me think because when I was in Elementary School we never had to do anything like this. We almost never even used the computers. This is just showing me how far technology has come and how much it is affecting schools. Also it seems like these kids are pretty smart because if 5th graders have to blog about Obama’s speech then have a discussion on it then the kids must be gifted or just worked really hard because when you think about it we didn’t even have to do anything like this in High School. I personally didn’t even see the speech. Really these teachers are just trying to get there kids ready for Middle School though. Look at it this way. I will use an example from the show “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader”. You always see some adults go up on that show and they miss some very easy questions. So this is showing that either these people didn’t do well in school or they didn’t even make it threw school which is very possible because according World Socialist Web Site more than 1.2 million High School students drop out every year. That’s a lot. One of the points that I’m trying to get at though is that anyone can make it threw school; it’s the people that help themselves though that actually do make it though. Teachers are only at school to help people help themselves. That's all teachers do. Everything we ever need to know is in a book somewhere or we can easily find what we want to know on the Internet. I mean don’t get me wrong teachers are great people and they constantly help us and point us in the right direction but with the technology these days we wouldn’t need them. But along with that I personally think that no one would ever do work if they didn’t have teachers to tell them what to do. I wouldn’t. This is what Mr. Fisch's article "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" made me think about.

Crime or Culture?

For my PLN response, I responded to an article posted by CNN about a 12 year old Yemeni girl who died in a painful childbirth. In Yemen and a lot of other Middle Eastern Countries girls are forced to marry very young and at the same time girls are always thought of less than guys and not appreciated, it has been like this for thousands of years but giving up your only child and forcing her to marry a 24 year old man. I mean there should be a limit at some point. And some girls are even younger, for instance, there is another story in this article about a 10 year old girl named Nujood Ali who was taken out of school and forced to marry a man who beat and raped her within weeks of their ceremony. These stories really made me think why people would allow this to happen or why parents would do this to their kids. But what we need to understand is that this is part of the Yemen culture and it has been ever since it was created. We can't just go in and tell them to stop. That's like the Yemen people coming over to the United States and telling us to stop being Christian or saying that we need to stop giving girls rights. Also when we look at them we think they are horrible people with no respect towards women, cruel and unusual methods, and bad living conditions. But what do they think when they look at the United States? When the Yemeni's look over here they probably think that our culture is all about crime, drug use, pre-marital sex, unfair laws, ect. We all know that it isn't completely like that. I mean we have problems but everyone does! One of our problem's is that whenever we hear about this kind of stuff, we just jump right to conclusion and "know" that is isn't right at all. Whenever a story like this gets on the news, we always make it sound bad but that is because they never explain the story behind it or about this other Countries culture. America is always quick to judge and we always will be. But that is just the way Americans have learned to act through thousands of years of fighting with other Countries and seeing there problems. We don't intentionally act like this it's just a natural response. Even with these problems though I say that we don't try to get involved because the only way we will be able to change anything is threw force and violence which there is already to much of in the world. I mean sure I think that it is wrong that people would do this but we have enough to worry about already just in the U.S. One last thing that we need to realize is that Europe and even western America used to do the exact same thing with forcing girls to marry at a very young age. So next time anyone see's something like this on the News or Internet or anywhere just stop and think, is it crime? Or is it culture?

Benefits of Technology

These days a lot people think that technology is a bad thing when really it is constantly helping people around the world. One of the main concerns of technology is computers and typing. People don't like this for reasons like it isn't real writing and abbreviations such as "lol" and "ttyl". I personally have never seen someone write any abbreviations like these on a paper or anything and i have never either. This is just one of my points about Technology being under estimated. One reason that technology is very helpful is threw the use of the Internet. Lets say that u miss an assignment at school or you lose a paper and it's do the next day. You can either email your teacher or print the assignment off. This helps a lot. It's like Micheal Wesch explains in his video, using the Internet is much easier and faster than writing something out. Plus there are features like spell check and grammer check so you don't have to worry as much about these kind of errors. An interesting fact from "The New Literacy" by Clive Thompson is that before he Internet was released most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a a school assignment. Unless you got a job that required producing text such as a job in the Law, Advertising, or Media. This actaully shows that the Internet helped get people involved in writting. These are a few of the reasons why i think that the Internet in a privilege and a tool, not something that hurts kids educatons and writing skills.