As I see student learning and the use of all of our tools in the classroom, I now often see the User ID as the most important. Now don’t get me wrong the paper and pencil are important. They need to write their User ID down somewhere before going to the lab.
I often find myself saying to people “since I have been using cell phones, I can no longer remember anybody’s phone number.” The sad truth is I often can’t even remember my own work cell number. But ask me what my phone number was growing up and its embedded in my brain forever. I can even remember some of my old high school friend’s old phone numbers, which does me very little at this point because they are all moved out of their parent’s homes by now. (or at least they should be).
Now our brains memory focuses on the User ID. We may still have memory issues on this and not surprising our students also do. Why? Because most students go home to their own computer and they have used the remember me item on their log-ins. This allows the computer to recognize their log in and automatically puts their password access in for them. Great tool if your home computer is completely secure from anybody’s use, but I still don’t recommend using that feature.
Students are better in ways at internet security than we give them credit for. First when they come to school they are forced to remember a password every time they log in because they are using public accessible computers and can’t use the remember me feature. Also most of the students have experience or know someone who has had their password sabotaged. This experience/knowledge for an adolescent is very personally violating that they quickly learn the lessons of private passwords. Yet we still need to encourage changing passwords frequently and keeping them private. When was the last time you changed your log-in password? I would be interested to see if our students are better role models of this or us educators.
SJ3
Meeting our Students Needs
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
How igoogle has increased my connection to people and streamlined my knowledge.
I am a fan of igoogle. There are so many things you can do with it, but I am just going to tell you how I use it. We have so many sites and applications that we can use, but logging separately into all of them and viewing the information is timely and overwhelming. I am able to organize my needs on igoogle for quick view and access.
The items I use on igoogle include: Twitter, Google Calendar, Facebook, Plurk, News Feeds, Google Reader, Weather, Google docs, Gmail, Blogs, Hulu, and YouTube to name the main applications. My communication tools such as twitter allow me to make updates and follow conversation threads easily. Once you discover RSS feeds and the power of information seeking you, instead of you wasting time searching, it can become a powerful knowledge gathering feature. I recommend using Google Reader.
I also have other frequent tools that I use that can be added to igoogle, but I prefer to have them set different. I use Delicious for social bookmarking and I am an avid user of Skype. I have Delicious on my tool bar for quick access and Skype on my task bar. These locations are very convenient, so I don’t need them to take up real estate space on my igoogle page.
I recommend starting with a couple digital tools. Get familiar with one tool and as you grow with digital tools add them to your igoogle home page. This can help you feel organized and up to date with your profiles and tools.
-SJ3
Meeting our Students Needs
I am a fan of igoogle. There are so many things you can do with it, but I am just going to tell you how I use it. We have so many sites and applications that we can use, but logging separately into all of them and viewing the information is timely and overwhelming. I am able to organize my needs on igoogle for quick view and access.
The items I use on igoogle include: Twitter, Google Calendar, Facebook, Plurk, News Feeds, Google Reader, Weather, Google docs, Gmail, Blogs, Hulu, and YouTube to name the main applications. My communication tools such as twitter allow me to make updates and follow conversation threads easily. Once you discover RSS feeds and the power of information seeking you, instead of you wasting time searching, it can become a powerful knowledge gathering feature. I recommend using Google Reader.
I also have other frequent tools that I use that can be added to igoogle, but I prefer to have them set different. I use Delicious for social bookmarking and I am an avid user of Skype. I have Delicious on my tool bar for quick access and Skype on my task bar. These locations are very convenient, so I don’t need them to take up real estate space on my igoogle page.
I recommend starting with a couple digital tools. Get familiar with one tool and as you grow with digital tools add them to your igoogle home page. This can help you feel organized and up to date with your profiles and tools.
-SJ3
Meeting our Students Needs
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