Flicker is a great way for people to communicate with each other through picture. Like the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

To me, a picture is like a paragraph or maybe more, it tells a lot about the person. Flickr is a great opportunity to give this chance to express yourself, communicate, elaborate and comments not with words but with pictures.

To communicate with pictures rather than words promotes creativity and thinking skills. The same picture might be seen from different perspectives. I think children and adults are able to think about the same picture differently and see it in different ways. Children are able to pick up the little details that we do not sometimes even see. So it is a great opportunity for children to express themselves by pictures, drawing or taking pictures, or looking at different pictures.

I like to look for pictures of children playing, I like to watch them, learn new ways of likes and dislikes. When I search I encounter lots of other pictures that I do not have in mind, for instance, some pictures discuss child labour. When you see the actual picture it is so much different than reading an article about children labour. When read an article you might imagine children in a situation, but reality is so much different, sometimes painful. In a picture you get to look into their eyes, see what they are doing when the picture was taken. Look at what they are wearing and in what condition they are in.

I showed my daughter a picture about children playing in a muddy puddle, without shoes and dirty clothes. She looked at the pictures and said that “oh god I wish I was with them”. Well what she saw was children playing and having fun. It did not even occur to her that these children might not have a decent life suited for them, or a decent home or school or even food. But these children for sure looked happy, and this is what mattered to her.

I think that Flikr is a great opportunity for people in general especially children, in order to see what really goes on in another part of the world.

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There are numerous articles, researches, and studies about music  and children and how important music is when linked to learning.

I think it is very important to look into that and take the matter seriously. Everything nowadays is commercialized, even food that a child eats.  If you watch a child’s TV channel you will notice that there are commercials about food, toys,, cloths, and CD every three to five minutes. The children are being brainwashed with all these products even sometimes if it is not healthy or does not promote the child’s learning skills.

If we look at commercials for food, we will find that these foods are very high on addictives and sugar like the chocolate cereals and chocolate syrup.  These commercials are always accompanied with symbols of toys and figures that relate to a famous cartoon. The message here is to follow the toy  or the figure that the box hold or contains. The motivation to eat healthy is lost in this chaos.  We would never encounter a commercial that promotes vegetables or fruits.

Even holidays are being commercialized; Christmas, Easter...even the new holiday family day, when it was the first year celebrated, and you can hear commercials about where to go or what to do.

How about music, the one of the most important learning tool  for children to explore, share, learn from, play with and most important have fun with.  Songs and music have been commercialized  and copywriter. If children are given the chance to create themselves, or share and explore music that are available out there imagine what they would do.

That is why I think that children should be given the opportunity to get music for free in order to learn and explore.  Especially children who parents cannot afford to buy a CD for them, to have access to programs that provide free music or free songs, will help these children excel and be children.

On the other hand we need to be sensitive towards families and share with them some songs and music from their culture. Using instruments from different countries and singing in different languages would help those families and their children feel that they belong and find something that relates to their culture.

I just want to say that I loved the idea of the wiki for children is a great idea where children all around the world share it and be able to access songs and music form their own culture.

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During my college years I did a portfolio that was required in one of my courses. At first I did not want to do it, it was so confusing and time consuming where I have to collect all my stuff and put them in a file or something that keep them kept together. Thinking back, I did not like to do it, but when it was done I loved it and still keep it.

Every now and then I will go into my storage room and get it out, look at the activities and the ideas I did and sometimes laugh and sometimes give myself a tap on the back.

After chapter 10 Assessing Meaningful Learning with Technology and how to write portfolios and how to share, work together and assess I started thinking. I realized that the only ones saw my portfolio were my friends in the classroom when I presented, my teacher, and  my family. The only person commented on it was my teacher, and it happened a long time ago.

At that time  most of my friends chose to put their portfolios in a file, I chose to put in a shoe box, in order to include a sample of the actual materials instead of only pictures. I keep adding stuff in it. But the idea of adding was not for assessing or improving as it was for collecting.

I started thinking about what if my friends who are working with me had the chance to see my portfolio, they might give me some ideas to how to add and improve some ideas and presentations. Being a teacher there is no right or wrong way to present an idea, it is very challenging. But with the assessment of other colleagues the portfolio would improve.

The idea of creating a shared portfolio is very useful especially for educators. Ideas and experiences would be shared, as well as assessment and evaluation of each other would be implemented. As well as presenting new idea. As I said before, there is no wrong or right way, it depends on the group of children you are teaching and the subject you are presenting.

I think that e-portfolios are very helpful for educators and students as well. You will not be having a box for yourself and only for storage purposes, the portfolio will be shared, assessed, commented on, give new ideas and evaluated. I think it is great and  we had it during our days in college, it would have been more useful.

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One laptop per child foundation this what the symbol stands for. I googled it and found out what their purpose is and their program as well as what is their proposal. OLPC foundation is a tax-exempt social benefit organization located in Massachusetts in the United States.    

Their mission is to enhance and sustain the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools in the lesser developed countries.  http://laptopfoundation.org is their website. http://wiki.laptop.org is their own wiki page.

 I understand that their program is to distribute a laptop to each child in the developing countries for the benefit of not only the child, but also the whole family.

I think if this happens and children around the world would be able to access programs on the computers that are available for children, and interact with others, learning and creativity would be endless. The laptop is called XO it is a special version that will be sold at $400 for two. OLCP are selling them on their website. You pay 400 for two, one for you and the other for a child in developing countries. I am including a youtube video information about the XO at the bottom of the page.

Laptops are very expensive to buy, but the XO laptop is not impossible to get because it is cheaper and it gives an opportunity for another child to one when you buy two. This will give the children an opportunity to be able to see what is going on around the world, develop some new friends that are going to share information with them as well as communicate their thoughts and express themselves in very creative and technological matter. Exploring, is what children do best, So with these XO laptops and being themselves they will do wonders.

When I say technological matter, I mean that children express themselves in different ways. For example the program ‘scratch’, where they can create their own character that they like and record the songs that they want even in different languages.

It does not matter what the curriculum is, or what country or city, children are creative and smart and they will learn anything when they are given the opportunity or chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IORykJgZ2o&feature=related 

After reading chapter one ‘What is Meaningful Learning’ I realized that I should have read it at the beginning of the course. The reason I am saying that because it explains the goals of integrating technology into education as well as the criteria of evaluating.

At the beginning of this chapter, the emphases are about getting students to learn in a meaningful way. And in order for learning to be meaningful it has to involve students in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative learning.

I will try and explain each one of those attributes and how they make sense to me. The book explains active as manipulative, observant and that makes a lot of sense. By being active they are not only observation, but they can also see the consequences of their play. For example, if a child pushes a toy from the table top, the child will wee the toy fall on the ground. The child is active in the process of his/her own learning. That reminds me of an old Chinese proverb I read somewhere it says that: “if you are listening you forget, if you are looking you forget, if you are doing you understand”. So I guess that being active and doing is a key to meaningful learning.

The second attribute is constructive, and according to my understanding it is when a learner start to understand the connection between the action and the consequence. Back to the example when a child drops a toy to the ground the child will understand that the toy will fell down and he/she would look down the next time he/she drops it.

Now the third attribute is Intentional. Everything in life has a goal. People do stuff for certain reasons and certain goal. In education the goal should be directed to the learner instead of the teacher.  When the child intentionally and directed herself through her goal to drop the toy of the table she is reaching her goal. 

And going the term authentic I think that real learning experiences are essential for life itself. The book gave an example about physics and learning through driving, walking instead of teaching formulas. Same as the example of the child dropping the toy, it is happening in a real life setting and all the actions and reactions are real.

The last attribute is cooperation. The books explain human nature as build for working together, collaborating with each other. Collaborating usually involves people negotiate and discuss among each other. Technology plays a very important rule in this domain because conversations and collaborations takes place not only in the classroom but also across the world where new perspectives of the same issue will be discussed.

So if we combine all those attributes: active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative integrated with technology we will have a generation of people that are able to deal with the real world.

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This is an amazing drawing by a four year old. She said that the butterfly still has in it the caterpillar and the cocoon. If you look at the body of the butterfly you notice the caterpillar. And If you look at the wings of the butterfly you will notice the cocoon. All in one, she combined her knowledge in a drawing that she enjoys doing. It is really amazing how children are very creative and are capable to express their knowledge and their feelings. She chose to put all the life patterns of the butterfly in the butterfly itself. She explained that she want all to be together just like a family. In a family there are grown ups, children and sometimes babies. She linked the pattern of the butterfly's life to a human life and she puts all together just like how families live together.

With a paper and a pen this four year old child was able to come up with something very creative. Her butterfly project includes a lot of the learning areas that we educators try to incorporate into our everyday teacher life. I see the most her capability of drawing a picture that has a scientific value, a social value, expressive and emotional value besides the motor skills and creativity, imagine what this girl might do if, or when, she is introduced to manipulate with technology tools or programs. There are no limits to what she might do or create that is so fascinating like her drawing.

When I saw this picture and talked to her I thought right away about the Scratch program that helps her express her creativity even more. I thought she have might done the life span of a butterfly from egg to butterfly, she might have done family members young and old and babies in a way that expresses her feelings. She might combine both together and relate each stage of life to another.

I understand that with a child’s imagination and a paper and pencil, wonders happens, but also with programs that promote children’s imagination and creativity, the benefits are endless as well. The next day I introduced scratch program to her and she was happy to press the buttons and see the characters move in-front of her. I thought .....let us wait until she has the hang of it after manipulating and start creating.

Scratch is amazing once you get the hang of it. When I first started I was just trying to make my character (sprite) move forward and backward. It is really true that when explore you learn better than someone teaching you how to do it, but you need a mentor. My mentor was very smart and creative and she was my 5 years old daughter. While I was exploring scratch they sat beside me and started asking questions.

One of the questions was “can you draw a picture of me mom”? and I said sure and we went to the command under the sprite that has the brush. She pressed the button and asked if she can draw it and of course I said yes. She drew her picture and it appeared as a second sprite or sprite 2. It was really nice to know that you can do a lot of things with this picture. I limited the options to two picture with hat, shoes and hat or we can do like animals around her picture that move and make sounds. The reason I limited the options is that I was new to this I did not know how to lot of things even though I knew creating with scratch is endless.

Of course she chose to dress up her drawing since she is a little princess. We ended up well she ended up drawing a necklace, a bracelet, earrings a long beautiful dress and of course high heels shoes.

“So what is next mom”, she asked. Well here comes the challenge. I browsed into the projects that are saved and I found the dress up monkey. So I took a look at the script for each sprite when I knew that each drawing has to be a sprite by itself. OK this is a start. So we started off with her picture and she chose the position. It was the easiest sprite we made because it was not supposed to move. Then we looked at the script of the other items and we did find suitable position for each sprite we even put in the command that every sprite (item) goes back to it’s spot after clicking the green flag. My daughter was sooo excited that she played it over and over again.

Now the next time I wanted to learn more about scratch I clicked on our saved project and I was really astonished when I found that she changed her own picture that she drew to a real picture she got from the computer in the picture folder. So I knew she was the best mentor that I would have to teach me creativity and exploring.

Note: I cannot post the project because it has my daughter’s picture and after listening to the video about human hackers, and how people can put a body for a child's picture of head, I will never make the picture available.

I was really amazed last summer when my family and I we were on a vacation and were supposed to go to the beach and suddenly it rained, so we had to stay home, where we all learned something new. Since my 14 years old daughter had a new video camera, she started exploring with it while everybody was sitting inside watching the rain and waiting for it to stop. She started video tapping each one of us and she asked that we say one sentence. When she was video tapping her sister  (12 my other daughter) she started to pretend to be a weather person talking about the weather. And then they took turns, and without realizing they were creating a15 minutes news about the family. After that they both brought pens and papers and started writing a 30 minute news including commercials.  

  The news was about almost everything, they started off with the headline news. They came up with a story about an abused pet and how animal society came and prosecuted the owner. They talked about the elections in the United States. They also included some news about the conflict in the Middle East. They talked about fashion and mostly about raincoats (since it was raining).

By just trying to explore the video camera they came up with the idea of the news. To create the news, they needed to create stories and connect them to  real life. They had to write the script for each news and they have to read the script in a special way. The way they divided the work between each other (even though they fought over who gets what) helped them practice team work, if not master it. They were the leaders to the news and asked other members of the family to help out in the commercials as well as setting up ‘the setting’, the place as well as dressing the news people. After video tapping they hooked the video camera to the lab-top and edit their work. Hours of working were worth a lot of learning. My first daughter knew that she wants to become a journalist, and I learned the meaning of the word constructionism.

Visual learning when you hear this word you think about the techniques of visual learning, and how it is an effective way where a child can learn visually and verbally. Children are able to connect things together when they hear and see, they are also able to relate things together as well as to recall some details. Some children take notes and relate to them later on. Tools of visual learning are amazing especially through video tapping. With the magic of combining visual learning with technology and introduce it to children as creators and not audience you will be amazed.

We all sat and watched the news. It was the most amazing news we heard in our whole lives and it was the best time spent in our vacation.

In Ontario we have a new holiday called family day. I really do not know what is the objective behind this holiday other than not everyone is able to celebrate it.

Families are the same every day and I do not think that we need a holiday to remind us that we have to celebrate ‘we are a family’. What about Sundays, and other holidays, aren’t those supposed to be family days too. Well some people celebrate family days at other times, just when they are off work and are able to spend time with their families. To me, family day was just a day that brought sorrow to some people more than joy to others, especially me.

 What about those people who were not able to take the day off. The only difference for them at that day is to struggle to find babysitting for their children. My husband and I had to go to work at that day and we had to struggle to find a babysitter for our children because they were off school. So we are at work thinking that everyone in Ontario are celebrating family day while our kids are with a babysitter and we are working. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling. It made it worse when I am driving and looking at the bus-drivers working, police officers are working and a whole bunch of other people working. I do not feel it is fair to call it family day because it brought up guilt and unhappiness for a lot of people that cannot spend it with their families.

But then when I was driving back home I realized that I will get home and see my children safe, healthy and happy, but this brought up lots of other thoughts. What about those families who lost a loved one. This ‘family day’ will bring up emotions of sorrow and remind the family how much they missed their loved ones.

Then I entered my neighbourhood thinking about all the other people that are far away from their families. One of the most unique things about Canada is the multi culture society. Being so, makes a lot of us first, second or third generation immigrants. And immigrant means away from your homeland to live in a new home. And being away from your homeland means leaving behind family and friends. So there you go, family day, a special day to make these people feel the pain that they are not with their own families.

I think that families should choose their day to celebrate their family and it is not supposed to be the same day for everyone.

OH MY GOD a big question then popped out of my head!!! What about those children who live in families and are abused by their own families. Is this going to be a day to celebrate for them?????

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I think that community building in technology is very helpful and important and has many advantages.

The very first advantage is what we are doing in this course how we are communicating with other student that have the same interest. Our community has a purpose, and that is  taking the same university course.  Discussing the same topic, communicating and commenting on each other. This is a good chance for collaborative learning where students comment on each other and critically analyze each other’s work, as well as the teacher’s comments.

 We have a place to gather and discuss, but we do not meet physically, we meet on a special place on the internet. A place that has an address, we type  the address and we are there in seconds. We write our thoughts and feelings, we know about each other without even meeting or seeing each other. There are rules and regulations of how to write or what is a blog. We communicate together agree on things and disagree on other. The teacher guides us and makes sure we are on the right track.

The advantages are really hard to count. Students share resources, stories about same experiences. In a classroom setting, there are lots of students who are not comfortable speaking out, this is a very good opportunity for them to express themselves.

Besides students, community building is very important for people who are unable to leave home and meet others to socialize and exchange thoughts and ideas. A person can type in his/her interest and communicate with each other easily. Especially in Canada where family support system is absent for many of us, blogging and meeting other people would release a lot of the stress that a person experiences. I read some blogs about single mother who are struggling with one income to make ends meet. These mothers were suggesting and advising each others about the best ways to save on groceries. There are tons of suggestions and ideas and experiences that a person might learn from. Not only a person can learn from others experiences but can also ask their opinion about a something.

 Community building with technology is like having friends or colleagues who can help you, keep you company,  give you advices and help you learn from their experiences, and help you find the right resources.

Before  the 1990^th computers, video games  were not very popular as today.   Children use to play outside in fields, go to parks, play hide and seek. Every child could afford to play these games. But nowadays, things have changed; children’s interests have changed as well. Children are more interested in video games and computers. But the big question is: can all the children in Canada afford to have a computer or have access to a computer. A number of families in Canada are living under the poverty line, struggling to have ends meet. Even sometimes are unable to get their children to libraries for transportation reasons or there is no time for struggling among two jobs.

I think it is very important that technology be integrated into classrooms so all children have access to learn and explore and gain equal education. Children learn through listening, reading, talking, discussing, experiencing, exploring and teaching:  happens in different percentages, but all these means of learning can be done at the same time if they used computers. They are able to communicate with children from different schools and discuss their opinions and understanding with each other. Integrating technology has also future benefit. These children are being prepared to be the future employees, have careers and own businesses, where at that time technology will be more needed than today.

Educators who oppose this notion of getting technology into classrooms fear that it might expose children into inappropriate sites: commercial, violence or sexual. But this is not an issue in schools or it is not supposed to be an issue because children are always monitored and supervised.

I am not trying to say let us replace books with computers, or other activities with technology, what I am trying to say let us give children equal opportunities and boost them up with more education that will help them succeed in the future. I wish I was more technology educated so I can help teach children get the best out of technology.

This is a very important issue to educate teachers the use of technology in order to help children get the best out of it.