Case Study on Technology Rough Draft

Introduction: Background information about your young person including geographic location, age, sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status, academic achievement, access to computers at home and school, parental rules about computer use, school rules about computer use, general description of computer use at home and school.

Jason is an 18 year old white male.  He lives in Burnsville WV with his parents.  He graduated from high school in May 2012.  He drove to high school his senior year.  Jason loves spending time on the computer.  He has a computer in his bedroom.  He is given full access to the computer and allowed to use it whenever he wants to.  He isn’t restricted from the computer on school nights.  His parents expect him to be responsible enough to complete his school work, keep up with his chores, and keep us with his job.  All these things will help him prepare for college in the fall.   He is planning to attend West Virginia University and major in Chemistry.   Jason is my nephew and he lives next door.  At this point I know he is on facebook once in a while and he uses a cell phone.

Hanging Out: How did your young person's use of computers reflect friendship driven practices and facilitate social interaction between their peers? Give concrete examples.

Jason is on his computer on a daily basis.  He is constantly checking his cell phone to see if he has any messages from his friends.  He is on his phone on the internet on facebook and twitter.  He has friends in a variety of states.  He talks to his friends in Lewis County where he just graduated High School.  He is talking with his new roommate that he will have when he moves into his WVU dorm in August.  One of the most important things to Jason would be the time he spends on his cell phone with his girl friend.  He tells me that he is on there with her for hours.  Different amounts of time each day.  He feels that not having a cell phone would impact the relationship that he has with his girl friend. 

Messing Around: How did your young person's use of computers provide them with informal learning opportunities to develop tech savvy skill sets? Give concrete examples.

Jason spends a lot of time on the computer.  He is always going to different sites.  He has learned how to go into these different sites and open forms and manipulate them.  He has found many different ways to get around being blocked from particular sites, even when he is in school.  He mentioned going to Youtube and some other music websites.  He saves a lot of music to use on his ipod and just to burn to cd’s to play in his car.  He likes to watch movies online and says he never has to worry about missing his favorite shows on television because he can just to onto the network site and download the episode that he missed and watch it whenever it is convienent for him. 

Geeking Out: Has your young person developed a particular interest or highly specialized skill sets as a result of their use of computers at home and school? Describe?

Jason mentioned that he does have a few favorite sites that he became fond of when he was beginning his love of chemistry.  He says that he is always finding new sites that help him with formulas and the periodic table.  He informed me that there are a lot of apps that can be downloaded to help with homework too.  Jason is a very bright boy and very eager to pour himself into his major at college.  Most of his life revolves around him preparing for college at this point. 

Digital Media and Schooling

How can teachers build on your young person's skills and interests that pertain to digital media at school? Why should teachers build on young peoples' Make connections to recommendations put forward by the National Council of Teachers for English (NCTE) in these policy briefs.

I think it would help if teachers allowed their students to demonstrate to the class, some of the new sites that they have found as well as how to use and manipulate those sites.  Students learn a lot from one another and are encouraged by their peers.  Teachers can learn a lot while their students are learning.   

Weekly Reading #6

don’t follow the rules.   

1.     What surprised you, concerned you, or intrigued about students’ access to technology in their homes?  I am surprised at how much parents are allowing their children to use computers in their bedrooms.  This to me is just promoting children to test the limits of the things that they really shouldn’t be doing.  There are a lot of children being given cellk phones.  Cell phones are one thing but smart phones?  They have constant access to internet and parents again are not monitoring their usage.

2.     What kinds of household spaces related to technology, or rules about using technology, were similar or dissimilar to your own household environment?  Students are allowed to use computers and cell phones where ever they want to.  I personally didn’t allow my daughters to use computers in their bed rooms.  They were allowed to be on the computer in the living room only.  I was always walking by to monitor what they were doing.  I personally think that more parents need to be monitoring what their children are doing online and be more involved in their lives.  They also need to become more technologically inclined. 

3.     Could this chapter be helpful for teachers who seek to integrate technology into their classroom activities in more meaningful ways?  Give an example from the chapter.

Yes this chapter could be helpful for a classroom teacher.  One of the things that they could consider is routines and restrictions (pg 172).  They could enforce that students complete certain parts of their assignments before they would be allowed to use their computers to do social projects or research.  It would be important for the classroom teacher to be very structured and to make sure her students knew what she expected.  They must also know the consequences if they don’t follow the rules.

Classroom Technology Survey

https://sites.google.com/site/livinginamediaworld/classroom-technology-survey

Weekly Reading #5

How does these chapter support or counter adult views of adolescent use of social media as destructive or frivolous? It seems that in the past that adults have frowned upon teens gathering in public places to socialize.  They ended up gathering in Malls when they were built to then socialize.  Teens are now using sites like facebook, MySpace and twitter to engage in their social lives.  If students do not have the opportunity to connect with their friends often on social media websites they feel like they would lose their social world pg79.  I think that adults still frown on teens using facebook and other social media sites as they think of it as a waste of time. 

How did this chapter change or confirm your understanding of adolescent use of social media? It is easy to see that teens need to be able to communicate to enhance their social world.  They are now able to reach out beyond their generational and cultural boundaries to enhance their social world pg82.  Students might have only had a couple of friends that they talked with or shared personal information with.  Now they easily could have a couple of hundred friends to shard themselves with.

When they are in what is considered an intimate relationship they are able to keep what is considered a leash on their significant other through the use of cell phones, social networking sites and instant messaging.  Teens having access to these technologies are actually changing and shaping the dating world as we know it.

What connections, if any, can you make between this chapter and learning in school?  One of the hardest things for schools to deal with is the drama that social media sites can cause.  There is a lot of bullying done on these sites pg 105.  This can take the focus away from learning.  Students aren’t just dealing with the drama while they are at school, they have it to deal with any time they are online.  So they actually cant get away from this drama.

Activity #1 Interview Highlights

Jason is a very active young man.  He is preparing for college, works at a job and still has time for games and computer chats.  He is constantly on his cell phone or answering messages.  He was on his cell phone while we were completing this interview.  He has four game systems.  He has a Playstation III, he has an XBOX Kinect, he has a WII and he also has a DS.  He also plays games on his computer while he is chatting to his friends.  He prefers to be doing more than one thing at a time; like talking with his friends and playing a game or doing homework.  He might even be talking to more than one friend at a time.  He prefers to stay busy and considers himself bored if he doesn’t have these games and his friends to talk to.  It is quite obvious that a student with this much access to technology would be easily bored in a classroom without the use of technology in the classroom.

Making connections between "A picture is worth a thousand words" and the Illuminated Text activity

Does the Illuminated text have potential to support student learning in school ? There is great potential in aiding student learning with illuminated text.  Students that are struggling readers benefit greatly from pictures.  For readers who struggle, pictures operate beyond the decoration function (Levin, Anglin, & Carney, 1987.)  Students often struggle with decoding words and miss what they are actually reading.  They also don’t understand text due to lack of experiences.  Hibbing & Rankin-Erickson (2011) suggest, “In our work with struggling readers we have found that the use of sketches, illustrations, picture books, and movies provides students with information on which to build their internal images.  Rusted and Coltheart (1979) confirmed that poor readers frequently move from text to pictures to text as they read, using the pictures as a tool for understanding.  Struggling readers often don’t have imagery skills and due to this deficit, it often leads to a reading disability.

I really like the idea of having students to draw pictures to indicate what they have learned or what they haven’t learned.  Generally students would rather draw you a picture than to have to write you an essay.  This allows students that are normally not writing much in their essays to be able to really express themselves with really detailed pictures.  The use of picture books could be very beneficial too.   Students don’t always interperate the emotions that the text had tried to convey.  In research, Gombrich's (1982) arguments supported the conclusion that pictures are supreme in their capacity to arouse emotions.

Movies really are great at helping to build background knowledge.  They really motivate students to learn the necessary information needed to read the text.  The excitement of knowing what you are about to read can really encourage a reluctant reader to read books that are longer than they would usually read.  I like the idea of WRWR, watch read, watch read.  This really helps the teacher to point out specific details that she wants her students to understand.

The illuminated text has the potiential to support students with many necessary skills to become better readers.

Media Ecology Case Study June 15

Jason is an 18 year old white male.  He lives in Burnsville WV with his parents.  He graduated from high school in May 2012.  He is given full access to the computer and allowed to use it whenever he wants to.  He isn’t restricted from the computer on school nights.  His parents expect him to be responsible enough to complete his school work, keep up with his chores, keep us with his job.  All these things will help him prepare for college in the fall.  Jason is my nephew and he lives next door.  At this point I know he is on facebook once in a while and he uses a cell phone.

A couple of interview questions that I thought of would be:
1.  What if you were not able to use your cell phone?  How would that impact your life?
2.  Can you prioritize the technology use in your life?  What is more important?  What could you live without?

Weekly Reading #3

1.  W hat findings in the Media Ecologies: Quanitative Perspectives surprised you the most?  How does the finding change the way you think about young peope, technology and learning?  It was odd to me that the Kaiser report found “That media engagement does not crowd out time spent with parents, pursuing hobbies, or doing physical activity.”  It seems to me that more people complain that families don’t spend time together any more due to kids constantly on their cell phones and computers.  They stay in their bedrooms and isolate themselves. 

2.  What are the benefits to a genre-based approach to understanding youth engagement with digital media over a categorical-based approach?  They feel that the Genre-based approach is more of a whole picture look into things.  It shows how people use a variety of digital media at the same time and moves away from doing things one at a time.  Things like watching tv or using a computer separately.

3.  What aspects of Michelle’s (Box 1.2) computer use at hime have implications for computer use at school?  Michelle has the opportunity to use a computer at home.  This gives her an advantage when she is at school.  She wont have to be instructed on simple computer skills like the other students will need.  This will help her to have more time to work on higher level thinking skills as well as increase her confidence level.

4.  As you read about Clarissa (Box 1.3) consider the affordances of digital technologies that help Clarissa shape her identity and the role they play in literacy engagement.  Do you think there are positive implications for these affordance in school-based literacy instruction?  If so, what are they.  If not, what are your concerns?  I believe that the digital technologies do have a positive implication on school-based literacy.  At our school our students have to write all their essays using the computers.  They are encouraged to use their creative writing skills.  Teachers use a variety of websites to enhance creative writing process.  I would like to see our teachers use blogs and wikis too.

5.  In the section titled Messing Around we read about the sophisticated and creative technology practices young people are developing on their own outside of school.  Do you think it is important for teachers to know about and understand these practices:  Why?  It is very important for classroom teachers to know about, understand and embrace the use of updated technologies.  Too many teachers are afraid to try things on computers.  They can be even completely resistant to learning new things.  I have heard a teacher this week in a training session say that she doesn’t have internet nad she has no plans to use it.  She even said that she doesn’t even hardly use her computer time that she is allotted in her school.  This is very sad to me.  There is no way students can advance in the necessary 21 century skills if they don’t have a teacher that embraces the idea of these skills herself.

6.  Should schools support students’ in “geeking out”?  What are the educational and ethical implications of “geeking out”?  I feel that if we are going to support students in learning about the most recent technology skills then we must allow them time to experiement.   Students would need to be monitored very closely of course.  Students need to be encouraged to learn these skills.  If we allow them access to programs and technology they will take ownership of them.    They will want to learn.  Too often studens are blocked from youtube, facebook, twitter and other social networking sites.  They need to be allowed to use these sites but with restrictions. 

7.  The young people studied for this book lived in urban settings in California or New York City.  Do you think young people in West Virginia behavior in similar ways and develop the same kinds of digital literacy’s?  Provide examples from your own experiences with young people in West Virginia.  I do think that students in West Virginia behave in similar ways compared to students from larger cities.  Students with internet are playing video games with students from other countries.  They are shopping online.  Several students use facebook and twitter.  Some even have blogs.  The disadvantage is internet access in our area.  Several students live in rural areas that don’t have internet and therefore they are shut out of a necessary form of communication.

Power point final version

Here is the link to my power point.  Wheww, this was challenging for me.
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/wvsuzieq-1441196-baseball-game-final-version/

Link to presentation

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/wvsuzieq-1436396-baseball-game/