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In the article Myspace, Facebook promote Literacy, Debra Lau Whelan talks about how social networking sites can help you gain more than just friends. Social networking sites offer e-safety, "Staying safe, keeping personal information safe, protecting yourself and your belongings, making sure that we don't participate in bullying or other antisocial behavior, and helping out other people who might be affected by these issues, is a key part of digital citizenship." Responsibility becomes a central role on these sites because their safety is at risk. Kids are able to control childish behaviors or prevent themselves from making rash decisions by using safe tactics on the internet. These sites broaden horizons for the users, letting them talk to people they may not have talked to otherwise, creating a variety and diverse web culture, driving away from cliques on school playgrounds. "Collaboration, discovery, and becoming a team player are all encouraged because these sites promote working, thinking, and acting together." Social networking sites allow users to create groups online to help find other people with the same interest as you. This allows communication on a topic that many people all over the world share a common interest in. Diversity brings new ideas and helps these users see things in a different point of view. These teens are not trapped in just with their classroom but they can't interact with people all over the world. Teens messing around on the computer on social networking sites is not just leisure time wasted, "Being able to quickly adapt to new technologies, services, and environments is already regarded as a highly valuable skill by employers, and can facilitate both formal and informal learning," Computer skills are adapted from using these sites, making it easier for teens to perform computer tasks in the future at work. This article gave me a new outlook on Facebook and social networking sites. I always thought that these sites w

This article talks about how children are changing their own literacy experiences in chat rooms, blogs, and emails. It is saying that now a days children sit in these structured classrooms and correct teachers and listen to lectures when their world they are living in is more technologically updated and high speed and better for their learning than these structured classrooms. It is based on how we can now have these things called "constructivist classrooms" which are classrooms with different levels of learning so that every child can learn this new world in all kinds of different ways says the article. It ties in how the internet can changes ways of teaching and can help teachers from everywhere learn more about their own teaching. This article hits all the highlights of how the internet affects us in daily lives and it talks about all the uses of it that can be used.

Jane McGonigal is talking about how we can connect real life to games.

in this video, Jane McGonigal describes that gaming is used everyday and online gaming is becoming more and more important. She also says how online gamers spend about 8 billion hours weekly just playing online games. Also how she is trying to change it from just having fun but to solve real life problems.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

"How Standardized Testing Damages Education," posted on, http://www.fairtest.org/facts/howharm.htm, the author talks about how standardized testing in schools today is damaging to students. The article talks about how the tests are biased but schools are still using it as a measurement of whether the student is ready for school or if they can go to the next grade. They also talk about how the tests have an emotional affect on the students. If a student is not able to go to the next grade, because of a bad test score, it's going to have a negative emotional affect and not necessarily improve their knowledge capabilities.

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing in regards to how they believe that standardized testing has damaged our education system. They begin by discussing how school use the tests the determine if students are ready for school, track them once they are in school, and help to develop and guide our schools curriculum, even though they are incredibly biased and are limited in their ability to measure achievement or ability in the students whom they are testing. They continue by arguing that these tests are very inaccurate when it comes to determining if a student is ready for school because they are 'overly academic and developmentally inappropriate in primary schooling.'

COOOOOL article--loved it.

This is a TED talk about placing computers in countries where children to not have access to teachers. In doing this, the children become their own teachers by pure interest in the computer, and in the end, they learn just as much, if not more, than children who have access to adult teachers.

resource of short talks by cool people

This article starts with talking about how students want to think outside of class. It states that they are scared sometimes of being judged on what they say or how they say it. Chat rooms or Backchannels is what they call them can help these students. In the article it shows some graphs about how the students used these chat rooms that were set up and how often they used them. according to the graphs as school seemed to continue, the students seemed to go in less. This article was great to understand the difference between in a classroom learning, and the way the web can teach the students and they can open up more and feel more safe in it. They don't want to learn between four walls all the time is stated in the article, and i think this is a great way to look at learning. broaden their horizons, because they all ready are and want to know that it is ok.

This entire article was about online chat rooms and how we can incorporate chat channels into schooling for collaboration, explanations, and discussion about topics in class. It talked about many of the good things and the bad things about chatting online and how we should be able to use chatting in school. The word backchannel is used for anything going on in the background while a teacher is lecturing or presenting. This idea of backchannel is talked about throughout the article. It explains what backchannel is, how we need to change schooling to work with it, what problems it creates, what things it works well with, why kids are using it so much, and how it could be used positively for classrooms.

In this talk Chellman talks about why girls have a better chance at succeeding in school than boys; and how should we change our methods of teaching today to improve the boys chances of success. She states that some of the reasons why this is happening is because, there are more female teachers than male teachers so they enforce their ideas on the boys. She goes on to say that there should be more input into creating video games which is something that boys are interested in as a source of teaching.

In this video, William Li talks about how we can lower our risk of cancer by eating local food. Food such as tomatoes, soy bean, cherry, etc. He also talks about the causes of cancer.

Gaming becomes a huge topic that goes on throughout life. Many people would talk about their games, for example Farmville and helping out by sending things and other related subjects. Also as you go on it slowly goes and connect yourself to other games and topics that are going through.

Jesse Schell talks about how video games was once fantasy base and now has penetrate into reality.He gave examples of how life would be like if it was a video game and how we would benefit from it. Games have grown into technologies and it will keep on growing.

In this video, Jane McGonigal talks about how individuals (online gamers) can make a better world. She mentioned that individuals play online games because it makes them happier and give them a feeling of working hard. Gamers do not give up when they fail and they tend to have a more strong social relationship than in real life. McGonigal said that gamers are human resource that we can use to do real world work. Instead of playing games and trying to save the virtual world, she had created online games intended to help gamers play and think critically about how to survive

It talks how an individual could use gaming as a source to improve daily life. Improving daily life as in improving hunger, poverty, and obesity.

In the video clip from TED talks Ali Carr-Chellman, an associate professor of education discusses how we can use something that is popular with boys to engage them in learning; because in schools today curriculum are set towards girls achieving more than boys.

In this video Ali Carr-Chellman talks about how boys aren't succeeding in their education and how gaming isn't the cause for this problem.

This article by Arnold Brown focuses on the impact of online social media, the "virtual world," on relationships, identity, community, and family. It talks about how relationships are established in the virtual world and how it may become if it increases later in the years. It talks about how family can still interact with each other even when one is far away from their family members. Lastly, it talks about how identity may be created online through users.

This article looks at other articles and gets into some of the social aspects of video games that are being talked about, as well as the effects of the video game industry on everyone. This article also looks at some writers that talk about why more and more people celebrate gaming because of the displays of powerful combination of entertainment, competition, and technology. While on the other hand the other writers talk about the social and moral aspects that they think are important. However, according to Michael Jindra, the author of this article, she thinks that all of them writers that she used agree that video games are a phenomenon that will have social implications. I personally think that we are bettering video games because we are moving more and more to a social way of gaming.

The article I choose to read is very similar to Gee's Book we have been reading. It begins by talking about a teacher in New York, who is teaching a 6th grade class. But, this is no ordinary class, he is teaching these students through video games. These kids not only have the opportunity to watch video games and plot the characters movements, but they also have the chance to create games themselves. I then goes on to talk about what it would be like if the way we educated kids completely changed.

"Could we survive without today's technology," by Isentry; this was the video that I looked at on Youtube.com for my research. It talked about how in today's world everyone is so dependable on today's technology, that it has enslaved us. It had many great examples, as in we pretty much worship the television, because the fact that we take so much information from it, and listen to it on everything we have to do. This goes from where to shop at, to where to eat, and even where not to eat. It also talked about how many people in today's society get anxiety attacks when they do not have their cell phones, or even just their Ipods.

In the book "Digital Nation: toward an inclusive information society" by Anthony G. Wilhelm, he states that "a new provision of national education policy in the United States states that every eighth-grader must be technology-literate regardless of socioeconomic status or race". Wilhelm argues that the way we look at education as a whole nation needs to change. It might be difficult because we will be both "integrating these new skills into traditional subject areas and, more fundamentally, in transcending disciplines and school walls in pursuit of a more rewarding relationship to knowledge", but the whole world is transforming be more technologically savvy. Wilhelm also talks about the staff for schools and how they too need to adapt to the changing environment. He talks about people who use the internet "engage in self-directed work" because they want to. They go on this website because they want to learn but didn't always get the chance to in school.

In the video, Ken Robinson says Schools kill Creativity, the speaker, Ken Robinson, talks about how not only the United States, but education systems all around the world, hinder children's creativity because that won't get them anywhere in life. He brings up this notion of creativity in schools being the most important thing, and programs like music, dance, and theatre are on the bottom of the totem pole where Math and English are perceived as the core subjects in schools. He challenges that notion. Why are Math and English at the top? The point of this video is to make people re-think creativity in school and the fact that education will not have a future if we keep dismissing the use of creativity in schools.

This article was based on the study of people addiction to technology. It talked about how people walk around on their cells phone and ignore the real world, as well as psychiatrists studying the habits on people and technology. The article also talked about how technology is ruining the relationship between people, because it is taking away the intimacy between the people.

In the online article Zero- Thumb Game How To Tame Texting, written by Sara Bernard, directly focuses on how to use texting as a tool in the classroom. This article doesn't look at texting as a horrible thing that needs. Another main topic in this article is how comfortable students are with text talk, that it creates an atmosphere where passive students feel as if they can participate. This directly shows how students feel more comfortable to participate because they are more comfortable with the technology. So maybe this idea of text messaging in the classroom isn't such a mad idea after all, it creates a comfortable environment for almost all students, and creates a new form of teaching when to use the text talk and when not to.