My First Report On EDUblogs

OK so I have gone through my three blogs and I found them all fairly interesting.
     The first blog that I read is by the Innovative educator. In her most recent post she discuss the importance of online citizenship. I was not familiar with this term until 20 minutes ago. But now I understand that online citizenship refers to responsible use of digital technologies specifically the importance of ensuring that are children and students are not being exposed to things on the internet that we do not want them exposed to. Another danger that is expressed in her blog is children receiving partial or incorrect information. She goes on to say that it is our responsibility to ensure the children s safety. One of the ways to accomplish this is to have THE TALK with our kids. In her words " are kids don't need to learn about the birds and the bee's online". I found and continue to find this particular blog interesting she is obviously very into technology but she also says that people need to be aware of proper technology usage. To supervise the quality rather than the quantity.
     The second blog that I read was all about the applications of youtube in the classroom. She started out by saying that a lessons can really be instantly more interesting with the help of a relevant video that helps to really drive the message home. She also added that since it is possible to create playlist easily on youtube a teacher can create a playlist of relevant videos. Another idea is to create a playlists of all the lessons of the year in case a student misses a class they can still get the material. Another application is perhaps making quizzes or other types of videos in a playlists. She went on to say that there are also other sites that provide great video archives that are very useful in the classroom. Among them were NASA TV, TED ED, How Stuff Works, and National Geographic. She discuss the benefits and qualities of each website and what they have to offer. I found this post particularly helpful and I plan on looking back to this post when I am actually teaching.

      The third blog that I read was by far the most interesting. In short the blog describes in an audio file the educational application of the popular sandbox game minecraft. So in the file Lucas Gillispie, a leader in one of the largest school based minecraft implementations in the world, explains some of the uses for minecraft in the classroom. He says that minecraft can be used to help teach social studies in that students can learn how to start a settlement or to pioneer and environment, additionally students can experience and grasp the concepts of government through the delegation of tasks and setting up of a hierarchy. Lucas also said that the students can gain some languages arts aspect by having to write based on there creations. He said that he has also heard of some simple math applications in that teachers use the simple block shapes that are in the game to help teach the simpler functions in math. Lucas added that minecraft can be used in a history setting, wherein students after completing research on some historical structure can recreate the structure in the game and then give a guided tour through a "museum" to parents and fellow students. I felt that this blog was very interesting first of all because I like minecraft. But more than that I found it interesting because I didn't really think of a video game as a tool for learning. I believe that this kind of revolutionary outlook on the materials used in the classroom will help to keep the students interested. Now while I am not sure about all of the uses that Lucas discussed, I am sure that there are some relevant applications.