Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture was very inspiring to me. As he begins his lecture he is very upbeat considering his condition and what he has to look forward to. Throughout his lecture, he talks about his childhood dreams, and the fundamentals that he learned as a child that helped him build his outlook on life. One thing I found interesting was how he said “we can not change the cards we are dealt, just how we play them.”

Randy shares many of his childhood dreams and what he learned from them. I like how he talks about learning to work harder for the things you want most. This implies to me a lot since I am an athlete and I work hard on everything I do and it pays off. As we live our lives, we will come to some difficult things. Randy refers back to “brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.” Don’t let obstacles hold you down - keep finding ways to get better and never give up. As we become teachers we will see many students give up on things, and we need to step in and tell them to keep going and things will always get worse before they get better, so just keep fighting.

During his lecture, he points out what it takes to become successful. Never forget the people that help us along the way. We all need help to succeed in life. Learn to tell the truth, be honest, admit your mistakes and don’t be selfish. Learn to respect authority while always questioning it in your mind to learn why. As Randy was going through his life he said to always have fun. You need to be able to teach people to believe in you, build trust and confidence in your abilities. Listen to your critics – they are outside looking in. Hold your tongue and just work harder and don’t complain. Always be prepared. Everyone has a good side.

In conclusion, this lecture was mainly for his children because he might not be around to tell them what he wants as they are growing up and to live their dreams.
Be good at something – don’t waste your life, you never know what day could be your last.

My Presentation

Is it ok to be technologically Illiterate?

Teacher Karl Fisch wrote a blog: http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-it-okay-to-be-technologically.html. It was mainly about how he struggles with how far behind many teachers, and people in general seem to be with technology. It is a rapidly growing part of our world today and to not understand how even some of it works can keep you cut off from the world. He feels that there should be certain requirements for teachers, pricipals and the administration alike to know about technology. Because without their knowledge, how are students going to be able to advance in it themselves if their own teachers do not know it??

I completely agree with this idea. Our world is relying more and more on technological advances everyday. With this being the case, we can not really afford to have our educators and their administrators be illiterate on the subject. i think that they should have to know an exceptional amount about these things in order to even be considered as a teacher.

The Best of April 2007

The article I picked was the Honorable Mention for April 2007 titled "Hating High School Vacations".
The article talks a lot about how hard children in other countries are working in the classroom everyday. The parents want their children to excel at an extremely high level and are going to extreme lengths to make that happen. For example some are even required to study 8 hours a day durning vacations! Every child's numver one priority is books and studying.

The article also discussed it's concern for America and their academic process. The US did what it needed to do in the past to make sure students are excelling at the level they need to. Now though, it is not the case as much. Our country today has
far more distractions and reasons to keep kids away from books and classrooms. This is causing America to lag far behind the other countries in academics and may greatly hurt us in the future.

Podcasts from the Fall

For our assignment this week we were told to listen to some students podcasts from last semester and to listen and critique them.
The first podcast I listened to was by Kelsey Volz and Crystal Powell. They had a discussion about the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch. They did a great job a summarizing the lecture and Randy. They also explain different types of strategies the he used to teach and explained how they can be so affective in the classroom. One thing I will try to do differently in my podcasts is to be extremely prepared in what I am going to say. I know sometimes when talking about things you can get confused and get words jumbled up and I've always tried not to let that happen when i'm making a speech or anything like that.

The next podcast I listened to was by Joel Graham, Noelle Shipman and Kimberly Kelly. Their topic of discussion was youtube for educational purposes. What I liked about this was how they talked about all the different things you could learn from youtube instead of just using it for entertainment. They also explain how it can be beneficial to put things like lectures and projects for your class on there. Another good thing that they did was discuss the fact that while youtube can be an effective tool it does have some inapropriate things that people can put on there and kids may sometimes accidentally run into them so parents may need to pay attention to what their kids are trying to get on to. Overall I thought this was a very organized podcast and I guess the only thing I can say is my goal on my podcast is to do my best not to get tongue tied even though I know it can be difficult sometimes.

Carmack's Critters

Carmack's Critters is a first grade blog from Butlerville Elementary. It has posts about different events happening in the school. The kids can go online and be updated on everything going on with their school. It also helps the parents to know all the assignments they are suppose to help keep their kids prepared in class. Unfortunately there are really no pictures I can put on here from their blog. The blog is http://www.butlerville.net/1a/

AP Comparative Government

Here is a pictre from the blog

One of the blogs I found was a class blog for AP Comparative Government. It's an educational website used for students to go online and keep up with their government assignment. It has updated information about current international events. There are new regular posts and different blogs for different countries. To look at the blog go to http://apcg.edublogs.org/.

Fisch Bowl

First I have to say WOW! I knew that technology has rapidly advanced and change the way we live in our world but I did not know the extent of it! This video really did a good job at explaining how many things computers, phones, the internet, televisions etc. are used with youth these days.
This video really opened my eyes to how all forms of technology are almost an absolute necessity in the world these days. I'm going to be a special education teacher one day and i'm going to need to start thinking how i'm going to incorporate these things into my everyday classroom activities.