It is not often that I sit down and write and words and thoughts just flow out, but that happened today. I have been taking part in a discussion happening over on Dan Meyer’s blog regarding students having a teachers mobile number.
A person left a comment stating in this discussion that said, “Yet another reason why internet filtering technology and cell phone bans are so successful.”
It turned out that the commenter was being sarcastic and I missed it. Whoops! Sorry Bill!
Anyway, this got me going (before I knew the post was fake) and I left a comment sharing my thoughts on the topic.
I like how it turned out so I am re-posting it here. Here is the reply that I left:
“Yet another reason why internet filtering technology and cell phone bans are so successful.”
Wow! What a statement. Not my cup of tea, but to each their own.
My opinion is that we are educators because we want to teach students something. Whether that be history, math, or whatever. In my case, I teach Industrial Technology (Shop Class). I consider it part my job to teach the procedures and understand how to safely use the tools and equipment before I turn them loose.
Who is teaching them how to properly and productively use the internet? Who is teaching them to use their cell phones properly and productively? In most cases, no one. Does that mean that they students are not using them, heck no. Once they leave school their cell phones are out and in action. At home, most have unfiltered internet.
As an educational system, I really think that we are missing out on teaching some basic skills that many of our students are missing.
Is the answer to filter the internet and ban cell phones, maybe. In my opinion we should be opening these up, teaching their proper usage and show the students how powerful these tools can be.
Just my 2 cents, keeps the change.
Every time that I visit a nice website I am always impressed to see a custom image appear by the web address. I have always wanted to do this to my page but never understood how.
After a quick google search, I found out that you need to have an image converted to a favicon and then insert some code into your page. So I spent a few minutes on Blender and created an image to convert.
I then used Dynamic Drive - Favicon Generator to convert my image to a favicon and uploaded it to my site. After the code was inserted into my header it was up and working.
If you would like to see a full size picture of my favicon, check it out here.
Wonderful speech from TED Talks that I wanted to share with you. Found it here.
“Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.”
Today has been much more successful for us. After suffering many issues yesterday including carb and brakes, we have overcome these problems and had two successful runs. Our first run gave us 195 mpg and our second run produced 197 mpg. We are in line right now for our third run and we are feeling pretty good. We are not in place to win this thing, but we have overcome many obstacles in the last two days. That is our personal victory.
