Mr. Conrad’s Blog

Do you think that you should take someone’s opinion as fact?

Why do you think that it is important to know how to understand “~”?

What could be the danger of a site like this?

Should these sites be allowed to be on the internet?

Post responses here:

What are your thoughts about communicating with anonamous poeple online?

Do you think that it is safe to communicate with anonamous people who can dissconnect from responsibility of what they post?

I think that this is a great chance and opportunity for me to be more comfortable with the internet and technology. I’m going to use blogging and technology to help me be in better contact with my students and my profession.

There is one application of Flickr that can be useful in Biology.

I can use it as an activity where my students have to label a picture of the animal or plant cell.

It might be more interesting than using a handout.

Interview with Scott

I have to disagree with the point that shift #5 is making that it is not essential to know material but to just know where it is.

The use of technology should not replace learning but enhance the acquisition of learning(knowledge). If students become proficient at just finding info and not necessarily “knowing” info then there will be a breakdown in the whole learning process.

If we did not have standardized testing then this might be a “neat” shift but because of testing, I feel that this is dangerous.

One of my students proves that natural selection can be influenced with motivation. All these students were doing were competing for beans in the grass. Notice the other students enthusiasm.

go-joe-go.AVI

I’m learning something new about myself. I’m learning that I can get very frustrated if I’m not familiar with the subject that I am suppossed to either be teaching or using in class (Vista). And I learned this while trying to understand “del.icio.us” during class when one of my students asked, “Mr. Conrad, are you having a bad day because you don’t look very happy?”

I had to stop and laugh at myself when I realized how I was being percieved by my students. These students are paying more attention then I think we give them credit for.

I hesitated to blindly start a wiki with my students because I, one did not want to teach a lesson where my students would have to turn around and teach me (maybe that would be a good thing, hmm….), two I am yet comfortable with the technology, and three I have a problem with trusting Wikipedia.

So in order to solve my fear of Wikipedia’s accuracy in general and in relationship to Biology I decided to have a lesson based on validating Wikipedia trustworthyness.

I’m currently on the subject of Evolution (which would be a great subject for my students to blog on) and have 15 terms that I wanted my students to research on Wikipedia. They then had to go to three other “reliable” websites and find the definition of the same terms. After finding all these definitions they then had to analyze them in comparison to Wikipedia’s definition to measure their accuracy.

My results…well let’s just say that Biology must be too boring of a topic for people to temper with.

I’ll explain tonight.