journal 3

Video in the Age of Participation
By Glen Bull

This Article presented by Glen Bull brings forth great new and upcoming ideas that can help teachers when planning their lessons for the week. Teachers, and everyone else for that matter, are beginning to recognize the explosion of the web use by students all around the globe. Because of its popularity, teachers have found themselves in need for some adjustments when it comes to maintaining student interest in the classroom with the use of technology. This article gives several examples in how to stay hip and up to date with your students with the use of the web. Bull mentions several different websites, mostly created by Discovery and National Geographic, that provide live web cams that have been placed all around the world. Bull supports websites such as these because of the increasing popularity of other not as useful sites such as U tube. The article concludes by mentioning how useful these websites can be in a classroom and how easy the creators have made it for the teachers to use within the short class period.

Question # 1: What is one lesson you think of in which you would be able to implement one of these websites/web cams?

I really like the idea of students observing other students and becoming aware of the many different ways in how to learn something. Web cams that are placed around the world could encourage an interesting topic for students to investigate. For example, a class based in San Diego could possibly observe a class in Tokyo through a web cam and watch the different methods of learning and classroom set-ups. Another great idea would be to use one of the National Geographic web cams to investigate animals around the world and use those observations for a report.

Question # 2: If you could place a web came anywhere (I mean anywhere) where would you put it, and what would you have your students do with it?

I would definitely put a camera on the sun. Wouldn’t it be so cool to watch the sun explode with all of those gases and energy? It would be a great video to show in class because we would be able to study all of the different reactions the sun has as well as help the students grasp the concept of the suns power.