Response to "Ch. 6 Technology Application Activity"

Ch. 6: ELABORATE: Individual

Technology Application Activity p. 202:

1. Well, I've already created a blog, so I suppose I'm ahead of the game on this assignment. I agree that blogs or similar style online forums for posting can be potentially greatly beneficial for self-expression and improving writing. I have a strong desire to use informal prompts in online e-class/Moodle sites to build up students' confidence and writing ability.

I can think of multiple different topics that could benefit from the sort of open dialogue blog's offer. There are multiple issues of perspective and bias and taking a stance on how you think a certain event went down. One of more obvious examples regards Hitler and World War II and the Holocaust, and students' feelings about why this happened and whether it could have been prevented.

There are also discussions that often take place in Participation in Government which would benefit from the space to talk about some of the issues. PIG discussions can encompass everything from abortion to gun control. It's a potentially very politically charged class. So this is also an opportunity to model how to have polite, civil, thoughtful conversations without resorting to just yelling at people who don't agree with them.

2. I did a search for "Christopher Columbus" on both Google and Dogpile. Honestly, the search results were pretty similar. The top 3 search results (minus some ad results on Dogpile that I ignored) for each site were exactly the same.

The key difference primarily appeared to be in the suggested related searches to make. Google's were much more generic than those that came up on Dogpile. For instance, Dogpile suggests "The Truth About Christopher Columbus", which points to the controversy surrounding Columbus and his actions. "Christopher Columbus Real Name" and "Christopher Columbus Early Life" hint at the haziness of some of the details about Columbus, such as the fact we're not entirely where he was born. This does a greater job of acknowledging some of the uncertainty in the historical narrative about Columbus.

3. From the "10 of the Best Apps for Education" article from eSchool News I discovered the "Today in History" ap. This does pretty much exactly what it sounds like, informing you of an event in history that took place on the given day you're looking at the ap. The ap could just be used generally with you encouraging students to take a look, or every time an event related to discussions that have been happening in class, you could draw attention to it.

From "Google Apps for Education", I could see myself using multiple aps from Google, including Google Classroom, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Slides. I already use several of these, and I've seen the ones I don't use regularly utilized in actual classrooms and the results looked pretty great. Google Classrooms capabilities for driving learning are really cool, combining features of Moodle with other neat ideas. The other mentioned Google ap resources are basic digital resources everyone should be using for writing essays, creating presentations and storing and sharing them.