C4T 2

For the past few weeks I have been reading and commenting on blog posts written by Dorothy Burt. Dorothy Burt lives in New Zealand. I really enjoyed reading her post and found her points very interesting. In the first post that I read, Ms. Burt talks about a series of articles that were sent that talked about school serving breakfast to students. In her post, Ms. Burt states “the paper informs us that numbers of kiwi students attend school with no breakfast. They also inform us that breakfast is necessary for learning to occur.” She also mentioned in the same week, “we have had agitation provoked by the media about schools stating that access to technology is necessary for students to learn.” Dorothy Burt stated that thinking about arguments made her think about shoes. She then began to talk about how when she was in primary school she never wore shoes. She says that these arguments are like her saying she needed shoes to learn.

At the end of her post, Ms. Burt asks her viewers of their opinion. She asked of the viewers experience with shoes and school and if they thought that it affected their learning in any way. In my comment to Ms. Burt, I explained to her that where I lived a dress code was given to students in which they had to follow. I wrote that even though I was required to wear a school uniform, I feel that shoes have no influence on learning. I stated that even though I did not like the idea of uniforms when I was in school, if students are all dressed a certain way, then some students will not feel left out and it will provide a more comfortable learning environment for them.

The second post that I read, Ms. Burt posted a video on the Teacher Dashboard. The video explained what the Teacher Dashboard was, how teachers use it, and the positive things about using it. The teacher dashboard uses Google docs to help teachers organize their lesson plans, share their documents with students, and allows teachers to keep an eye on what their students are doing. The Teacher Dashboard is very helpful to teachers and students because it allows them to access their documents and work from any computer.

I commented on Ms. Burt’s post telling her how neat that I thought the Teacher Dashboard was. I told her it was not until I started EDM 310 that I realized how many useful tools that Google had to offer. I stated of how I have found Google docs to be so helpful this semester and that I use it very often. I told her that I hoped to be able to use the Teacher Dashboard when I get in the classroom and that I thought it was a wonderful tool.