Earth Hour

ETEC 414 Video Project: Earth Hour

Lilly Pads

Experimenting with Auto Depth-of-Field (DoF) setting on Canon Rebel xT.  ISO 400, F/3.5 18mm (18-55), 1/100s Shutter speed, Auto Focus (AF), Daylight White Balance (WB).

An Exercise with Technology Take-1

Speech students will divide into 3 groups, represent one of the three major 2008 presidential (Obama/Clinton, McCain, and Nader) candidates and set a stage to emulate a presidential policy debate with the teacher as moderator.  Each group will be responsible for researching via candidate and support websites their candidates' stances on selected topics including national healthcare, educational reform, the war on terrorism, the national budget, and global warming in order to defend their candidate's position and challenge the opposition.  Each group will also select a member to represent their candidate in the formal debate which will occur in a set room separate from the rest of the class.  Each representative will dress appropriately for a formal event and the debate will be streamed live by video-conference into the student-filled classroom.  The formal debate portion will consist of each representative providing a 3 minute introduction to their candidate's policies followed by 7 minutes of defense as the other representatives challenge.  At the end of the formal portion of the debate, classroom students will ask one question each, addressing either a specific candidate or the entire panel at large.  At the end of the activity, each student will anonymously submit a vote for their favorite real candidate given what they have learned through the activity and a class nominee will be discovered.

Standards to be posted soon.

Running Comment-ary

After skimming through some comments accompanying some blogs, I discovered no new conclusions in regards to their comments feature.  Comments, in general, serve to compliment (praise), criticizes (suggest), attach related/unrelated information to, or any possible combinations of the three.  In my opinion, typical comments promote/support, detract from/flame, enhance, or answer questions raised in the content.  They tell a blogger that there's an audience out there that's interested in the subject or author.

A Blog about a Blog

After instituting an internet search for "English teacher blog" and briefly scanning through the returns, I came across The English Teacher Blog, a resource for "English teachers all over the world," says its author/editor/moderator Carla Beard.  The blog features repartee on seldom-explained aspects of life as an English teacher with an occasional insightful homage to pedagogy for good measure.  It's the kind of reading that keeps English teachers sane after a long day's work, I think.  "YES! I'm not the only one whose done this" one may think after reading the Education Jargon Generator post.  And here's a great satirical commentary on technology and education that ETEC 414 students may appreciate.  Check out the hyperlinked posts for starters and read on if you found these particularly amusing and/or helpful.

A Link to Copyright Info

Here is a link to a layman's copyrights law website.

Public Displays of Attrition

Public displays of attrition,  the web is full of them.  They manifest themselves as un-updated websites and blogs, as pictorials chronicling the aging of someone or thing.... This blog will follow my journey through the semester of ETEC 414.