11-4-10 Exit Post

Today in class the class group presented the last chapter. Something Professor Boyer stressed about the presentation is that when dividing groups it is important to assign what groups should discuss before groups gather. Expectations should come first followed by dividing into groups. Another thing to keep in mind is the sizes of groups in order to provide opportunities for everyone to participate in the discussions.

After the presentation we read an article from Professor Boyer’s Twitter account. The article discussed a charter school that has no designated classes and surprisingly functions without teachers. I am worried about this type of schooling because that means that I will be out of a job in the future.  Looking past the fact that this could potentially limit my opportunities for employment, I think this idea is well thought out and is obviously successful. I think that the school day should not be 100% on computers. Students need to have hands on activities and physical movement during their school day. The health of America’s youth seems to be declining rapidly and if in school students are only sitting on computers for their entire school day this would increase the severity of health issues.

We talked about Scratch and how we need to improve our iRLO for our final products. Professor Boyer went over common problems that he saw in everyone’s iRLO. We discussed how long the text on the screen should be visible, and it should be visible for the time it takes you to read through it twice. We discussed how our peers are a great resource to use. If we see something we think is neat and would like to add into our iRLO we should download their project and see how they did it, or just ask them.

I was glad that we talked about our technology inquiry wiki in class because there are lots of things that I realize I need to work on and improve.  I need to add more to my annotations when describing what the source is focused on and why it is applicable to my wiki. Of all the projects so far this technology wiki is becoming my least favorite.