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"Uncanny" may be a feeling that most of the parents of students in my online course may be feeling as they support their child in taking an online class.

Parents, teachers, and administrators need to be instructed on how to create meaningful learning activities using new technology such as the computer. Students are longing for this kind of authentic and meaningful learning. What is the purpose of school if students are not presented with critical thinking and problem solving activities that bring them to a higher level of thinking and learning?

The resource I would like to add for the MERLOT project is actually a resource that I submitted to MERLOT back in April. The resource is a blog/power point presentation that is designed to be a resource for parents. The information in this power point presentation comes from Victoria Carrington's article "The Uncanny: Digital Texts and Literacy". The power point presentation is designed in an easy to read story book format which tells of a modern day child named "TechTiger" who changes the perspective of his parents, teachers, and other in the older "uncanny" generation due to his media literacy and experiences with contemporary culture. I will incorporate this resource into my online course by adding it to my parent corner. Since my Life Cycle course is intended for a third grade audience, I have designed an area for parents so that they are aware of what their child is learning in this course as well as ways they could enrich their child outside of my course on topics they are learning. Some parents who have their child enrolled in my online course may be "uncanny" to media literacy and have some of the concerns that are addressed in the resource TechTiger's Space. The resource TechTiger's Space may put into perspective some parent's fears with technology as well as the added benefits to put their minds at ease and support their child's online learning experience.

For example, Mel Riddile points out that when one conditions on various measures of poverty, instead of trailing other nations, the U.S. actually comes out on top! He concludes that "when it comes to school improvement, it's poverty not stupid." Poverty causes educational deficiency. Now, I like to actually have data to play around with, in part because people have been known to lie about politically charged issues and in part because I like to have nice graphs (which are not provided by Riddile). Anyway, it turns out that international poverty data is pretty hard to come by and fraught with interpretational difficulties. On the other hand, the National Assessment of Educational Progress provides test data for most of the states in the U.S., and the U.S. Census Bureau provides data on the percentage of people in poverty by state. I took the NAEP data for 8th grade science achievement and regressed on the percentage of people below the poverty line for the measured states. The two are negatively associated: as poverty increases, science achievement scores decrease according to the relationship in the plot below. (Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, and Vermont did not meet NAEP reporting guidelines and are not included in the plot above.) The association is highly significant (p=9.98*10-6). I also took pilot NAEP data for 8th grade mathematics achievement and regressed on the percentage of people below the poverty line for the measured states. (Evidently, the NAEP has only just started testing for mathematics achievement, and only eleven states were included in their pilot.) Again, the two are negatively associated. The slope of the relation turns out to be almost exactly the same as for science achievement. The association is not as significant, but it is still significant (p=0.0186). (My guess is the association is less significant in this case because fewer states were measured.) Clearly there is an association between poverty and achievement in science and mathem

Issues including whether parents should be reading kids' private emails, and how parents should deal with open social media sites.

Study on Web 2.0 tools for educational purposes. "Web 2.0 technologies are fundamentally reshaping and realigning many aspects of the communication loop: the people with whom teachers, students, and parents communicate; how they communicate; what they communicate about; and where and when they communicate."

blog discussion on the topic

Thanks again Alex, I read the Ms. Magazine blog as well through your Twitter post and want to incorporate them into additional sources for my parents' facebook group!

Donna Angley's post

By Carol Rolheiser and John A. Ross