Friday, December 16, 2011

Internet safety

I spent a couple hours learning about internet safety this week. One reason I spent more time is that I got distracted by watching the teen safety videos on netsmartz.com. I must admit, the stories and facts that I learned were a bit frightening. I read the whole site for internet safety on the ldstech website and found a bunch of statistics on cyber bullying. I was surprised by how young kids are when they start being bullied. I was also surprised by how easily information can be found. It made me wonder if it is too late for me to lock up all my information that has already been shared through facebook and such. I googled my name and found that the first two pages of search results are actually about me. I taught my sister (who has two boys) all about what I had learned and even showed her one of the videos that I thought would be most helpful to her.

The thing that we spent the most time on was kid safe browsers. I showed her Kidzui and she decided to look into it. we were about to download it, but our computer told us that it was from an unknown publisher. How can I trust places like kidzui if I haven't used it before. Have any of you used it? Is it actually safe? Does it really work to keep our children off of the typical websites? My sister said that she likes nick jr., but nick jr still has adds that her kids can click on that take them away from the site onto places that she has never seen before. Does Kidzui get rid of that problem? My sister and I decided together to be more careful and watch out for danger on the internet. I hope my nephews, and everyone else I love, feel the same!

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Movie Reflections

I made this movie movie with the idea of it being a project I could have my chemistry students do. It would have been after we learn about the difference between chemical and physical changes. Then my students could think of examples of each type of change and come up with a project to show what they know. If they have to think about examples, find ways to portray them and present them to the class, they can have more confidence in the idea that they actually know what they are talking about and they will be more reflective about their learning. Plus I feel like my students would have a lot of fun doing something like this. I know the high school student that helped me had fun!

My First Movie!!!!