Goals for Semester 2

For the second semester of my 9th grade year I would all in all just do better in everything I do than last semester. For example last semester when I did my assignments I felt like I was just being lazy in doing them to get it over with and not gave them a lot of thought and time, so for this semester I am going to try to not be so lazy and give it my all. I would also like a much better grade than I did last semester and shoot for an A. In able for me to achieve that I think I would have to do better on my PLN’s because last semester that is what really hurt my grade I did them just to get it over with and a lot of times didn't do them, so this semester you will be seeing more PLN's from me. Another thing that affected my grade that I would like to improve on was the fact that I did not really proofread all my writing and this semester, even thought I really don’t like to proofread, I am going to try very hard to get in the habit of proofreading so my work can not just be a rough draft, but a final product. Those are my goals for this semester.

What Matters Final Presentation

Self evaluation

I think I did better for my first PLN presentation because this time I was not quite as well prepared. When I was presenting I felt like I kept repeating my self and getting stuck on what to say next, like the last time I presented I talked a little to quickly. I don't know why, but this time I was a little more nervous about presenting and felt like my voice was a little to shaky sometimes. Other than that I think I did pretty well.

PLN 25

This week I read a blog by Vicki A. Davis titled "Some practical recommendations on teens and social networking: based on some good primary research" and it was about how at school and how teachers kind of put off social sited that teens use today and kind of don't use it to their advantage and think that it is bad when it can be use to help teen with their educations.

What I thought mattered from this blog was that teachers are not using tools and sites like face book and myspace to help their students. Even to the world this is very useful you hear about this one girl or guy making plans to meet with someone from another country and instead of thinking of it as danger we could use it to communicate with people from other countries and get their opinions and make it as an educational resource.It was just a list of recommendations about ways to use social networks as an advantage and I think it is a very good ideas, here is what she recommended.....

Teens are not as savvy as they and we might think. They are not able to fully
assess risk, and even when they do assess risk they don’t necessarily behave
accordingly. Therefore schools should do more than scaremongering or reading the
riot act. They should:
Provide teenagers with practical strategies to help them avoid giving away private information.
Encourage the use of social networking sites in school in order to train students in their proper use.
Ensure that students fully understand that it is not easy to delete all traces of oneself from a community, because of comments left on other people’s blogs or profiles.
Encourage teachers to join online communities for the purpose of CPD. The school could even have its own Ning community, or similar, for the exchanging of ideas and resources, and for virtual staff meetings.
Taking part in an online community would help teachers to understand their
students’ experience.
Teenagers use social networking sites and similar Social networking sites in order to do school-related work. Therefore it may be a good idea to encourage popular social networking sites to provide easily accessible resources that students could make use of.
Encourage social networking sites to make deletion of personal data a one-click operation, or as near to that as possible"

PLN 24

This week I read an blog titled "How much does this really matter" by Dave and in this blog it talks about how the people around us believe and understand little science and how many people believe in more pseudoscience. Here are the stats.

Scientific:

66% do not understand DNA, “margin of error,” the scientific process, and do not
believe in evolution.
50% do not know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun, and a quarter does not even know that the earth goes around the sun.
50% think humans coexisted with dinosaurs and believe antibiotics kill viruses.

Pseudoscience:

88% believe in alternative medicine.
50% believe in extrasensory perception and faith healing.
40% believe in haunted houses and demonic possession.
33% believes in lucky numbers, ghosts, telepathy,
clairvoyance, astrology, and that UFOs are aliens from space.
25% believes in witches and that we can communicate with the dead.

Then at the end of the blog Dave asks if we should be concerned about the fact that more people around us think and believe more in communication with the dead than knowing how long it takes the earth to orbit the sun. What I thought mattered from this is that in the end he kind of mentions that people when they are raised do what they are told and kind of grow up to believe what they are told, but then again when they grow up they kind of don't really think about how they were raised and why they and their family believe in what they believe in. When I read that last part it kind of made me think about why my family believes in what they believe in and how I was raised and thought the was I was. Then I realized that I was not really thought to believe in a certain way and not really thought that I had to do this because previous generations did it. I was just kind of raised and thought to make my own opinions on things and to kind of not think one way and to be open minded. Of course to be honest and how to be polite, but not really how to think of things.

This relates to the world because when others are thought to think of things in a particular way they are kind of judged by it and it causes other problems like a chain reaction.

PLN week 10-1

For the first blog I read this week it was more like a movie by Mr. Fisch titled "What Will You Learn Today?" and the whole short video was about students being in charge of their learning. In this video in the blog it had very little words, but a very big meaning behind those very few words.

In the two sentences in the blog is very important and the thing that is so important is students learn what they want to learn. When you ask the question "What will you learn today?" it is kind of referring to what you want to learn and what you want to listen to. I have never thought of it that way, but I think that it is completely true. When a student is not interested in something they will more than likely not listen to what it is about, but when you do that then you are kind of making the decision to no have that knowledge that might become useful to you in the future. It seems kind of scary when you think about learning that way because you can't really force a student to want to learn, they also have to want it to, to be able to learn. When a student take control of what they have to learn and what they want to learn that is where they kind of mess up. Lets just say I think to be successful you have to want to learn everything and to be open minded about learning.

PLN week 11-2

This week I read a blog that was about alcohol titled "Why???" by Crosby. In this blog he asked the questions

"Why is alcohol a protected drug?"

Then he askes

"If Joe Camel got yanked off of ads because he appealed to kids, then why is
Captain Morgan still used?

What I thought mattered form this blog was the issue of alcohol and what is does and how it effects me. This was an interesting blog for me because alcohool is a big problem in our world today including other types of drugs. There are so many people messing up their lives with alcohol and drugs and people doing wrong. This problem getting in the way of what they want to accomplish and how people get addicted to it and not know how to stop.

This matters to me because alcohol is the reason why I don't know my father and why he left my brother, sister, mom and I when I was so young. It ruend his life because just recently I was given a chance to know him and he told me that when I was young he drank a lot and wouldn't be good to my mom, and I would hear stories of him doing this and that and what kind of person he was and I kind of thank him for leaving because of the person people portrayed him as when I didn't know him. It is not fun not knowing who your father is and that is why this blog kind of stuck out to me and also this problem of alcohol and drugs.