Cyberbullying

I read an article from the PBS Teachers, learning.now blog called "CA Legislation Criminalizes Campus Cyberbullying."

The article talked about legislation in California that would give school principals the ability to suspend students or recommend them for explusion if they determinded that online bullying took place. This legislation would cover computers, videos, text messages, etc. In addition to class time, it applies to lunch time, time going to and from school, and off-campus school-sponsored events. It cannot cover time at home.
I found this article very interesting and encouraging. Text messaging and online websites such as facebook and MySpace are a large percentage of how students spend their time. Since both are forms of non face-to-face communication, I feel like students are more daring to be nasty and harassing to others (compared to face to face). Giving the power to principals to punish those who bully others in this way is definitely a move into the right direction. Students need to know that this behavior is bullying and will not be tolerated.

Social Networking

I was really surprised by this concept of social networking. Even through the various technology staff development seminars at my work, I have never heard of this concept. I have heard of facebook and my space, but I was not aware that they could be considered "social networks," although it makes sense now. ning. com was a very interesting website that hosted countless numbers of social networks ranging from ninjas to education. I decided to search for networks dealing with foreign language teachers, and at first I was surprised to find that many are by invitation only. However, I did find one called "technoLanguages" and the group I visited is called "Collaborate language learning." This group is dedicated to sharing various projects and ideas across the different foreign languages. This is a great ambition because even though there are many different languages, we still learn them in similar ways.

Here is the link! http://technolanguages.ning.com/group/collaborativelanguagelearning

Connectivism

Learners are like sponges. They can soak up and acquire knowledge readily, or the information presented to them can go "in through one ear and out the other." This is similar to the two different states of a sponge. If it is wet, it easily soaks things up. However, it does not soak things as easily when it is dry. Depending on how the information is delivered to the students, greatly determines to what extent they actually acquire the knowledge. It's not so much the value of what's being learned, but how the learning is being conveyed to the learners.
The article "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age" explains how learning theories are shifting from learning being an internal, individualistic activity to it presently being more of a networking activity. We now depend on others. Karen Stephenson said, "Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people's experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. " This principle of networking is an important aspect of connectivism.

Blogging in the LOTE classroom

There are a variety of ideas that I could easily implement into my Spanish III & IV classes. Here are four ideas that I plan to try this year:

• Post assignments based on news articles and have students respond on their own Weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work. Students can create their own blogs, find articles, complete the article assignments on their blogs, including their reaction, and paste the link of their blog into mine.
  
• Provide online readings/articles for my students to read and react to. This is similar to the idea mentioned above, except students will respond to the given article instead of finding their own.
  
• Invite student comments or posting on issues in order to give them a writing voice. My Spanish IV students can discuss and react to various issues we will cover this year including political unrest in Latin America and global warming.
  
• Post prompts for writing. This could be an alternative method for practicing writing for the Regents Exam.