Second Chance at Life?

Why Hello My beautiful Followers. The presentation today was a real exciting one for me because I have had some experience with Second Life and have done a research project on the different aspects of Second Life. I did a research paper for a class in my undergraduate degree which involved researching Second Life. My paper was comparing the literary secondary worlds such as Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter with the Cyber secondary world such as Second Life. I found a lot of interesting things while researching Second Life and its participants. In my research I found a lot of handicap and disfigured members of society were heavily into the game on Second Life. They felt as if it was a second chance at life and live a life they had set out through their avatar. I found a lot of paraplegic people felt that they had the opportunity to not only to walk through their avatars but to fly. For example in the recent Blockbuster movie Avatar by James Cameron portrayed the main character as a paraplegic on purpose in order to show how much satisfaction a disabled person get through the portrayal of their avatar. I find this to be fascinating and it is something that is interesting to research and understand more about. As educators we work with a lot of students that have disabilities and I feel that this program is something that could help students get a real life satisfaction. I believe that Second Life is something that is an interesting topic that classrooms can research and use a classroom project in order to develop understanding of businesses and how money works with Linden Dollars. This is defiantly a program I would suggest to teachers in business administration as a project for developing a business perspective and look at the game in that aspect. Overall this presentation was really interesting to me because of my background in Second Life and it was defiantly something that I would recommend to teachers to incorporate this into their classroom.

Dr. Alec Couros Presentation

Hello Hello Sharda Here. I thought todays presentation was unreal!!!!!!. Using the Elluminate softeware was sooo cool. It really showed me how much technology has advanced over the past years because we just had a presentation for a whole class without having a person infront of us. I felt that this presentation was one of the best presentation ive had as a University student. The presentation was very interactive that provided videos and images of the variety of things alec was talking about. This is some awesome technology that I think i would incorporate into my teaching practices and enhance what I am trying to show students.

When reflecting on what Dr. Alec Couros said about social networking changing the world of teaching is something I agree with. I feel tha teachers need to adopt these practices such as facebook and twitters and use them as a proper way to interact with students in relations to questions for assignments and activities. I believe that new educators must adopt these social networking tools and use it to connect with students on a professional student teacher relationship basis in regards to the class. Students are really into social networking and i think we as educators must adopt this practice and incoprorate this into our teaching practices.

I really liked the slide share program that was introduced. i really think that it is a good idea to share power point presentations and it could really save some time. Teachers can resource these materials and create their own power points while using ideas from what they have available on the slides. Teachers along with students have a hard time starting anything and these pre made power point slides can really help people get started and develop their own presenation.

John Evans Presenation

Hello My beautiful people, Sharda here with his very first blog post. Our guest speaker, John Evans, gave a very informative presentation today. He provided us with a wiki that will be an awesome resource for helping me to infuse technology into my classroom. I found it very cool that Evans was The Nominee for Best Individual Twitter of the Year for Educators. That seems to be a huge accomplishment and it really shows his interest in technology and education.
When reflecting on the video that Evans told us to watch I really thought is was a creative video itself. I was really dreading watching the video because it was 20 minutes long but once it start it was very entertaining. The speaker makes many jokes that makes his speech very light and interesting to watch. I feel that Sir Ken Robinson touches on many valid points as it relates to creativity and Education.
I agree with Robinson when he states that we are getting away from creativity because we as people are so scared of making mistakes. I think he believes in order to be creative one must be willing to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes to try something new and original. Students are so scared to be wrong that they take the safe side to everything and eliminate all creative aspects that they develop.
If studeents are scared to be wrong they cannont develop anything of their own or anything that is an orginal thought. I feel that we as educators should adopt students creativity rather than crush it or shun away from it.
Educators should adopt all forms of creativity and try to incorporate into their teaching. Robinson ends his speech with a quote by : "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth within 50 years all life on earth would end, If all human beings disappeared from the earth all life would flourish" This shows that we must give the gift to children to become creative and create a bright future for themsleves and as educators we must promote thios rather than shun it.