Hey everyone,

Here is the article that I chose for week 13

We have all probably heard a lot about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, and most people can agree that the biggest attraction to this product is that it was developed so that they can be distributed to needy children all over the world. Since we have all seen them in class, I will not describe how they look, but I’m sure most of you will agree they seem as if they will be very appealing for all young children. Last year, Negroponte said that they would be producing 1 million laptops per month, which makes OLPC a powerhouse from the start, because collectively all of laptop manufacturers worldwide produce about 5 million units per month.

What most of us perhaps didn’t know was that other computer companies became threatened by the OLPC project and created similar computers but for reasons of profit. Intel for example, developed a similar laptop called Classmate and is charging $250 for it. This run ones Windows or Linux, while the OLPCs XO laptop is based on an AMD processor and runs Linux. During an interview, when Negroponte was asked about that competition, he replied “when someone is selling something below cost in competition with you its called dumping, and when you’re the one taking that approach you call it forward pricing.” He goes on to say that “what Intel is doing is predatory- we know what its cost are… and it doesn’t benefit the children OLPC is trying to help. Intel should be ashamed of itself.” The computer that Intel created is also behind the OLPC as it doesn’t support the feature that enables the children to interact with each other. It also doesn’t have the alternative ways to power the unit like the OLPC does. There are people who are skeptical of these new computers, and are not sure if they will do the Third World nation much good, but from seeing one, and briefly understanding what it is capable of, it is obviously that any child who gets one of these computers will love it, and that these computers will defiantly encourage and allow children to enhance their education through technology at a young age. It would be interesting to hear about whether or not these laptops have been successful in both the developed nations and the Third World countries, so if anyone has heard anything about either the OLPC laptop, or the one that Intel made, please feel free to share.

Word Count: 444

Hey everyone so this is my article for week 13.

I read an article about a recent study that was published by the National Writing Project (2007). It found that Americans believe that computers have a positive effect on their children’s writing skills. The importance of learning to use technology ranked just below learning to read and write, and 74 percent of the people who took the survey think that children should begin to learn about computers at a young age. The purpose of this was to explain the ways that parents, caregivers, and teachers of young children are able to introduce technology to young children while at the same time, building their early literacy skills. It was clear that many of the educators and parents wondered when to introduce computers to young children, and what software is most appropriate for young children. The article writes “Researchers have long advised educators and parents that children under the age of 3 do not need to use computers” (Cantor, 2001; Elkind, 1998; Haugland, 1999; Healey, 1998; Hohmann, 1998). The toddler years are a time for young children to learn how to crawl, walk, and develop social skills. Children at this age do not have a long enough attention span to learn how to use a computer, and they benefit most from learning through movement and exploring with their senses. Software companies attempt to entice parents with attractive cartoon characters and with research asserting that the window of opportunity to introduce children to computers can open as young as nine months of age (www.superkids.com/aweb/ pages/reviews/multisub/baby/). Parents then believe that they need to introduce their children to technology at the earliest age possible. The author believes that caregivers and teachers of young children must educate parents about the importance of waiting until children are developmentally ready.

According to this article, children can be introduced to technology beginning at age 3 or 4 (Haugland, 1999). Research has shown that an interesting benefit of doing this encourage children's development of positive attitudes toward learning, and that they help children advance their social communication skills.

I wanted to include the following websites so that everyone has a few resources of good websites for young children to use.

* KidSpace@the Internet (www.ipl. org/div/kidspace/browse/rzn2000) offers numerous interactive picture book stories for children to read online-and links to additional, interesting websites with interactive K-3 appropriate stories, such as those involving such familiar characters as Clifford and Elmo.

* The International Children's Digital Library (www.icdlbooks. org) provides a wealth of colorfully illustrated books that include interesting plots. The website does not charge a fee, and books from around the world are featured in multiple languages.

* StoryLine Online (www.storylineonline.net) is the best read-aloud book list available on the Web, and my personal favorite. This website offers books read aloud by popular actors from the Screen Actors Guild, such as Camryn Manheim, Haylie Duff, Amber Tamblyn, and Jason Alexander. Additional activities are included with each book that asks children to draw inferences and retell the story. The website also has a phone line service that allows children to call in and listen to an actor read a book.

* TumbleBooks (www.tumblebooks.com) offers one of the best websites for interactive read-along stories. Although the website charges a fee, they offer a trial issue. The books are engaging, interesting, and beautifully illustrated (Lacina, 2008).

Word Count: 550

I decided that for this last chapter, I would focus on what interested me the most, the Clicker Assessment Tools. The first thing that they reminded me of was the show “who wants to be a millionaire” when the contestant chooses to ask the audience.  Everyone gets a chance to be part of the game, by choosing an answer that gets polled and displayed on the main screen.  I had no idea that these Clickers are being used in elementary through college-level classes. I think that it is a great way to engage students in learning, let them have a little fun, and make use of technology in the class. These could also increase classroom involvement because in many of my classes I have witnessed the teacher asking a general question, and the students rarely responding. With the Clickers they reduce the chance of shy students not participating with the collective class. They were also described in the text s being intrinsically motivating, and appealing for students to use. Another interesting point that I found was that clickers allow those “who normally lose the opportunity to answer questions to those who raise their hands quickly” (p.233). The professors can also gain valuable statistics perhaps for their thesis by asking their class questions to gain specific statistics on that demographic. Clickers provide for fast, easy and reliable results. While reading about how great these clickers were, the thought in the back in my mind was that they were surely expensive. The text surprised me by writing that they range in price from $6 to $60 dollars each. Discounts are also available to large orders so they would be very affordable to use in schools.  With technology rapidly evolving, some systems are incorporating a confidence level feature that allows students to input their confidence level along with their answer. I think that the Clickers would be best used for close-ended questions, or general polls. They would not work well for questions that asked for a lot of detail as then it would make them more difficult to use then easy. For younger children as the text suggest they would probably be best used in a game, as something fun to do that can help them expand their experience with technology as well as prepare them for later use in answering questions.  What I really like about technology and everything I have been learning about in this course so far is that teachers are learners too along side of their students. Everyone is given the chance to grow together regardless of their starting point or experience with technology.

 After reading Chapter 1, I strongly agreed with what was written about the characteristics of meaningful learning.  The text explains that "tasks that require international, active, constructive, cooperative, and authentic learning processes will result in more meaningful learning." Throughout many of the reflections that I have been asked to write throughout my time at Ryerson, this idea has always been a strong theme throughout all of them. I find that I do my best at tasks that I am truly interested in. This mirrors what the text says about intentional learning. Its needs to be goal-directed, so that children want to learn. The learning material needs to be able to relate in some way to the children. This is what the text refers to as Authentic. I personally found that it was much easier to solve a math problem about a dog walker who has 5 dogs, and then 2 ran away, then figure out what 5-2=?.  Active learning is very important as I believe it can help children retain the knowledge that they are learning much more effectively. By actually doing something, you are able to learn for yourself and not learn abstractly through books or movies. Through my experiences and documentation I have also witnessed the essential role that constructive learning has. I believe that a great way for children to engage in this kind of learning is for them to keep a journal and write about the activities that they have done and what they learned from them. It is also important for children to be actively engaged in describing photos that have been taken of them. They then help in creating a memorable reflection and at the same time have the change to extend their learning by reflecting on the actual photograph.  Lastly I just wanted to point out something I found very interesting about collaboration. From my experience, many of my teachers stressed the importance of individual work, when in reality it is cooperation skills that can help people collaborate with each other to gain what they need without stressing solely on their own. We naturally talk with people, we naturally try and solve problems together (2 brains are better than 1) but yet children are given the tasks of working on their own. I believe that individual assignments are good practice for those times when you’re isolated at home without contact with anyone else, but for all those other times collaboration is the way to go!

Hey Everyone,

So I finally uploaded the pictures I took onto the Flicker Website, and I found it very easy to do, and enjoyable. I took pictures from around my house, but tried to get low down to the floor to capture the view that I child would have. I also used the knowledge that I read about in the children and photography article to take pictures of subject matter that would be interesting to a child. Luckily my room has plenty of stuffed animals, and my house is filled with childhood memories, so it wasn't to hard for me to find things that would interest a child. I also put captions under the pictures, which explains a little bit about what the child said about their photographs. I feel that online albums, where the children can display their photographs are a great idea to implement into classroom settings. For children photography is a great learning experience, and it becomes even more meaningful when the activity is extended so that the children can reflect upon the images they capture, and share them with their friends and family. Obviously their is the concern for privacy, but their is a feature on Flicker that allows the user to choose who they want to share their photographs with. I really enjoyed completing this assignment, and loved how simple and fast I was able to create my album and share it with friends and even groups of people that I added. Oh I almost forgot, here is the link to the photo's I put up, take a look because I think they are fairly funny. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24471714@N04/

Word Count: 271

I found the article about the children’s’ photographs to be very interesting. I actually went to the website that was provided in the article to look at some of the photographs, and I was very impressed with everything I saw. I enjoyed looking at the photographs that the children took, and even found it more enjoyable to read the answers that they gave which accompanied their photographs. I was surprised to read that children were using words like “memento” in their answers when they were only 7 years old. I’m sure the interviewers wouldn’t have changed their words but I was just surprised by the rich vocabulary that I read throughout many of quotes that I read below the photographs. I wanted to share a couple of examples that I stood out for me when I was glancing through the photographs.

A seven-year-old girl named Claire was answering questions about a photograph of a dog that she had taken: Why do you like this photo? Claire: I like it because I love that dog, and then because I really like it because we’ve already lost one and I wouldn’t like to lose it again, I wouldn’t like to lose it. I: What will you do with this photo? Claire: I’ll keep it because it’s a souvenir for me and then each time I see it my heart beats really fast.

Another example that interested me was this one:

When a seven year old girl was asked about the picture she had taken of a house, If you could change or improve this photo, how would you do it?... Maud: ...I’d like to change the colour of the shutters.

It would be interesting to further ask her how she would change the colour, I wonder if she knows that she can change the colour through a Photoshop program, or if she would say that she would need to paint them with a brush. I thought that it was interesting to ask the children about why they took the photographs, I myself never really thought about why I take them, but now that I have put a bit of thought into my answer I have realized that most of the photographs I take are for amusement. It’s fun to take photographs, and it extends that amount of enjoyment you instantly get from partaking in an activity. With the photographs you can remember the fun times you had, or the beautiful things that you saw. I personally also enjoy taking photographs for artistic purposes and find myself trying to be creative with what I capture.

I really liked how the children were asked to use the camera in any way they wished rather than being instructed to ‘take photographs’. I also never realized that photographs varied depending on the age of the photographer. It was interesting to read about the youngest children in the study and how they were predominantly accompanied by members of their families at the time of taking the photographs. It would be interesting to further extend this study to see if there are differences between young adults, middle-aged adults, and the elderly. The study could have also examined the differences in the photos between each country. Perhaps there are differences in what the children took photographs relative to the cultural norms of their country? I also think that the methods in this study could be used by parents to ask their children about the photographs they take so that they could write what their children on the back of the photos. This would make for a very interesting album, and great memoir for the children to look back upon when they get older.

Word Count: 514

 Hey everyone!!!


Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I have had a crazy couple of weeks, and blogging still hasn’t become part of my daily routine yet.  I wanted to share my scratch creation with everyone and now that I have figured out how to put it online, here is the link to it http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/shinitz/111577 
At first is found Scratch fairly difficult to work with, but after playing around with it and giving it a few days rest, I was able to create something I am very proud of. I will be creating more animations because they really are fun to do, watch and share. I could see how Scratch could be a great program for children to use, and how they could probably create some very original projects. I also had a question about my Wiki creation, which was the short story about bubbles the fish. I made a mistake in how I named the title and realized that I could not change the title without changing the link that linked it to the rest of the Wiki pages. How do you change the name of a link, without changing the link that is attached to that name? It sounds a bit confusing, but I hope someone can understand and help me because I could not find the answer online. I posted a link to my Wiki in my previous post, so please go check it out!

Hey everyone,

So i created a short children's story on my wiki page that you might want to check out...

http://lemmingworks.org/earlychildhoodeducation/index.php?title=User:Shoshi999r

You should all try something out on it.... its fun!

Upon reading the article entitled: “Hacking Human: data-archaeology and surveillance in social networks." The main thought left in my head, was that I was a stalker, and that it is so easy to become one. Through facebook I have become an addictive stalker of people who are not necessarily my friends. Facebook puts pressure people to add each other because they don’t want to be considered rude if they don’t add someone that is familiar to them. I have access to many people’s profiles, pictures, videos, and wall post with their other friends, and I don’t consider myself a close friend to the majority of them. I find myself however stalking certain people, trying to get a glimpse of what is going on in their lives, pictures to see how they look, and even updates that they post about themselves. Facebook makes it easy for me to find out when anything important has changed in anyone’s life, by posting it all together on a homepage so that I have a guide to tell me which profiles I need to visit that day. I am embarrassed of what I am doing, yet it had become so mainstream that I am able to confess about it on this blog, and continue to stalk people without even feeling to weird about it.

When practicing how to use the Wiki, I must confess that it was really easy and fun to do. I remember struggling with the Wiki in my music and creative arts class. It was really hard for me to understand what was going on, and I was having trouble doing what I wanted to do. I thought it was really cool how the Wiki allowed me to easily use Jason Nolan’s name to lead viewers to his live journal page. I also found the “Most frequent Wiki markup explained” site to really help me better understand how to edit on my Wiki. I can see myself returning to this page a lot during my project because the instructions are simply and clearly laid out for me. For some reason it was a bit difficult for me to upload a picture of myself on my page, but the process just made it that more rewarding for me when I finally saw my picture up there! I really enjoyed this process and I think the clear instructions played a large role in my enjoyment. I am looking forward to getting started the SongChild project, and am thankful for such an organized and helpful professor.

Word Count: 421