A Day at the TLT

I’m going to take a break from looking at East Asia for the week and blog about something else. Yesterday I got the opportunity to attend the 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium at Penn State. Earlier this year a group of students, myself included, applied to present at the conference for a class project on digital storytelling and the preservation of stories. To our dismay we did not get accepted, but knowing that there would be a lot of good information about what professors are doing with technology in their classrooms, we decided to go anyway.

Breakfast and check in started at 7:30 and it was a great time to get together with faculty to talk about projects they were doing in their classes, and what we had done in ours. The keynote speaker, Dr. Michael Wesch, talked about how he was using social media in his classroom to get students more engaged in learning. He made a collaborative work environment so that his students would be able to learn all they could from each other and then put it together in a multimedia project.

Then it was off to the sessions.

At 9:45 we went to a session called “Digital Stories as Counter-Texts”. It was a project that used digital media as a platform to address issues with children’s literature and how to re-write them. The student’s project used everything from video to podcasts to make the final product.

At 10:45 we took a break to get some snacks and to talk with Justin Miller about our project and the Media Commons. It was nice to chat about some different techniques in video editing and digital storytelling.

Then it was lunchtime! At 12:15 there was a faculty panel on how social media engages students. The panel also talked about the benefits of using social media and what the students got out of it.

After lunch there were more sessions.

At 1:30 we went to one called “Bringing YouTube Into Angel,” which focused on how to incorporate YouTube onto the Angel site without allowing students to get sidetracked by other links. We went to it so that we could take the information back to some of the professors on our campus and they could use it for their classes.

For the last session at 2:30, we went to the session called “Blogs as e-Portfolio.” We are going to take what was presented here and try to apply some of the concepts to our e-portfolios for this class.

So that was our day at the TLT. We had a lot of fun and got to meet faculty from all over who want to engage students by using media and technology in new ways. I think it was a beneficial experience for us as students, because it showed us that many professors are willing to incorporate new technologies in their classrooms and also that as students we can take these technologies and do more with them.

Orange Skies

Can you imagine waking up and the sky being orange? That’s what residents in and around China’s capital of Beijing did on Saturday.

USA Today reported yesterday that the sandstorm was the worst so far this year. Affecting regions as far as “the regions of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei.”

“Chun Youngsin, a researcher at the Korea Meteorological Administration, said the yellow dust was expected to hit the Korean peninsula beginning Saturday afternoon and it would be "the worst yellow dust" this year,” according to the USA Today article.

The sandstorms come from the vast desert that covers about a third of the country and despite conservation efforts; experts think that it will take decades to reduce the number of sandstorms that hit the country. Even residents understand the need for conservation, USA Today talked to Shi Chunyan, a Beijing resident, who said, "I think this kind of natural disaster is caused by human activity, but I don't know the exact reason, and I don't know exactly what we can do to prevent this.”

Image from USA TODAY

Inked Up

In the USA tattoos are often thought of as being taboo, but in Thailand, there are tattoos that are thought to give the person “super-human powers.”

From Buddhist monks to Hollywood celebrities, people are flocking to Thailand to Wat Bang Phra, a gathering of people demonstrating the powers their tattoos have given them. Yan tattoos are the source of these powers. CNN reported that, “Yan tattoos are becoming ever more popular in this mainly Buddhist country. It's an ancient belief dating back hundreds of years. Some think their tattoos provide protection at a time when there is such political turbulence and division in the country.”

It is cool to see tattoos in a different way, that they are perceived as a good thing rather as being a sign of rebellion. Whether or not the tattoos actually give the bearer super-human powers is up to the individual themselves.


photos from CNN

Free School, Special Treatment

CNN reported the other day about China’s first government run school for autistic children. Guangzhou’s Cana School is the first of it’s kind in China. There are about 100 kids currently attending and more than a thousand on the waiting list. With a teacher ratio of 2:1, the students each have an individual education plan that is tailored to fit their needs. It is a free, full day program that is open to children between the ages of 7 and 14 years old.

I think that it is important for governments, not only in China, to develop programs for children with special needs. Besides opening jobs for teachers, it allows the children opportunities they may not have if they were taught at home or in a regular school. To have a free program that is tailored to each individual child is especially nice because it allows the child to advance at their own rate and not get left behind in a broader lesson plan.