Reaction for Chapter 1- Wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc. (because it is all I have right now)...

The first concept the author explored that I identified with was the idea that because of the influence of technology so early in our lives (he quotes from Dr. Winn) “children think differently from us.” Because of this different manner of thinking students also learn differently- many of mine see answering questions in a webquest as fun while the same questions from a book are seen as painfully boring. I know from observing many students on my team get more quality learning time from spending time on computer based learning programs like “Study Island” or “SuccessMaker” than in a traditional classroom setting because they are less easily distracted when they are plugged in. Because I yet to have the full text (thanks google for getting me ahead)I am not sure if the author goes into more detail about the Rich Site Summaries, Aggregators, of Social bookmarking he mentions on pg. 8. However, I having never even heard of this am interested to know more about it. It seems very advantageous for a group of teachers-lets say all the JCPS teachers using the 8th grade module to be able to create a “social book mark” of all the sites relevant to our module on light. You could organize it per investigations and it would be a great timesaver as each teacher wouldn’t have to do as much searching. Finally, I could not agree more that students will, willingly or unwillingly come across inappropriate content anytime they use real resources. My funny teacher related to this is when my students looking through a stack of my grandmothers magazines found “porn” or at least a cartoon of how to do a breast examine… Anyhow, from this experience I realize that students will find inappropriate content on the internet. However, I am not sure that my students would be as easily trained to quickly turn away from this content as the author’s students. In fact, I think mine seek it out and I sometimes avoid letting them on the computer for that very reason.