Digital Citizenship Projects

I thought all the digital citizenship project presentations were very cool, well thought-out and informative. I think my favorite of all had to be the social networking site one--not that I necessarily learned a whole lot--most of the stuff I already knew from experienc--but I thought it was very cute and creative how they made the background for their PowerPoint that had our pictures as their "friends" on facebook. I laughed out loud at that. Their presentation was good as well--if I were not already on facebook, I would have found it useful to learn about what it is like, what you can do with it, and what the pros and cons are of using it. It was also good they included information about being responsible with it and what can happen (especially to teachers) if they are not responsible with what they put on facebook.
My second favorite demonstration was the one Katy and Lance & Sarah did about netiquette. I mostly knew most of the information already, but I did think they presented it in a very creative and clever way. I thought it was a good idea to include that little quiz at the end and I thought the David Letterman style introduction was very well done.
Overall, I found all the projects informative and creative. I thought it was good to teach people about responsible uses of technology.

GaETC conference

On Thursday, I went to the GaETC conference for the first time. It was a very "new but old" experience--meaning that tough I've been to conferences before, they have been related to my subject matter--foreign language--and not technology. It was interesting to see teachers of all levels and fields rather than simply foreign language teachers. I really enjoyed the exhibit hall the most, I think, but some of the sessions were really informative as well. The sessions I went to included one about a guy who used FileMaker Pro to make a database to manage his students' projects and rubrics. I thought it was a very good and very useful idea--the one unfortunate thing is that he does not have the ability to give or sell this software yet, so it's useful for him, but not for others. I also went to a session about google applications, which was a very popular session. It was neat to find out about the google calendar and some of the other applications available through google. After lunch, I went to the exhibit hall for a bit, where I saw Chrissi. We went outside to chat for a bit about our digital citizenship project and when we went back, we attended a session that gave us some good insight about it--the session was about legal issues related to students' and teachers' use of technology in schools. It was very good because it was given by a guy who works in our system (Gwinnett) so it was very relevant. Finally, I went to a session about Photoshop elements, and that session made me really want to get that program! You can do all sorts of stuff much more easily in PSe than in Photoshop itself.
Overall, the conference was worthwhile to attend--I saw a lot of cool uses of technology in the classroom and I feel "in the loop" about what technologies we may see soon in the future at our schools.

Critical thinking

On the topic of critical thinking, I suppose I really don't do nearly as much with encouraging critical thinking as I should in my classroom. I suppose teaching a first and second year language course, I imply focus on the more verbal skills that is simply memorization and application of concepts rather than much with critical thinking. There are occasionally "categorizing" and higher level thinking skills like trying to group items into categories and figuring out what doesn't belong in the category, but other than those sorts of activities, I suppose there's not very much critical thinking. I think they are very important for students, and I guess I just think my subject matter doesn't lend itself to critical thinking as other subjects do. I'm sure that's probably false and I could do as much with it as any other subject could, but I can't think offhand of many ways to make it more critical-thinking based. Maybe I should have some peer revisions of written language paragraphs, which I do use on occasion, but I'm sure I could do more and I just don't. Any suggestions would be welcomed!