Week+8

​​ Today's class
= March 5th 2010: Thoughts in advance of the class for week 8: =

=== Acceptable Use Policies: ​ My children have been signing the acceptable use policy of the OCDSB since they were both about 5 years old. Yes - if there is computer access, a signature is required. Of course, I was required to sign, and explain! When my daughter was in Grade 1 my job as a parent volunteer was to supervise children on the computers in the small room off the library. I had as many as five children working on reading software on different computers. ===

I think that they are a good first step. I wonder how well they are enforced. How often do students have warnings or consequences for inappropriate use?
​ === Video conferencing: or basically having a 'meeting' without actually travelling to be there. Save on travel costs! That was the hype twenty years ago. Some companies use it well, and we are now all used to absent guest speakers being able to 'join us by video link' or hearing messages 'important people' who are somewhere, either live or pre-taped. === === Bandwidth is an issue which actually gets discussed at our house. The Government, specifically Industry Canada, is trying to determine how to provide broadband internet access to Canadians. It is working out how to subsidize/encourage the private sector to offer the best but most economical service to as many Canadians as possible. They already have dial-up access, but that's "too slow" for today's applications. It can use wireless links and/or satellite links, depending upon the circumstances, but not fibre optics. Bandwidth is how much data gets through how fast, so it is usually measured in kilobits per second for dial-up and Megabits per second for broadband. The speed of the internet has increased. Having a T1 rate (1.544 Mbits/s) used to be fast and only something that a large company could afford. I'm not sure how fast our connection is now (1.8 Mbits/s download), but we can stream video. We do have a limit as to how much we can download (20 Gigabytes per month) and, while we were averaging 8GB, the Olympics pushed us to about 16GB. At least we did not go over and have to pay extra. ===

=== On-line courses: Last term I took PED 3103 on-line. A couple of my classes post material on the virtual campus LMS of UofO. I will be taking FSL Part 1 on-line through Lakehead University in May/June 2010. This is the new way of doing things. One student joined my PED 3106 class specifically because she was not learning through the on-line course. While I know that I am an audio learner, I did not find it difficult to learn in the PED 3103 class. It was so flexible that I probably spent more time on it, so any loss of audio was compensated for by increased video. I read papers on the bus. I watched videos on Saturday nights. I am not sure how it would be to never meet one's classmates. We were in groups, and we did meet a few times to work on group assignments, or have discussions. I did not need a microphone, nor did I have to on-line at a specific time to chat. I havenot heard how it will be for the FSL Part 1 course, but I do now have a microphone, but not a headset. ===

=== Assistive Technologies and Spec Ed: I have been volunteering in a LD congregated class since October (Grades 6-8). They all have laptops and use various software. Also, our PED 3106 class has touched upon the topic of assistive technologies since Anna Bowles works with students with them, and she teaches our PED 3106 class. ===

=== Here is my first attempt at Comic Life. If the Scouting Group paints lamp posts again, maybe my husband will share this comic. He showed me how to save it as a pdf, which was much better than what I did initially! ===

[[file:Lamp post painting[1].pdf]] ​
 Presentation (will be put up on course site) ** Media Literacy triangle: text, audience and production.
 * Barb McLaughlin (Elementary IT consultant OCDSB)

Comics have conventions setting: establishing shot, close-up format: colour, font, bubbles panels: tilt, shadow gutters: inferring time (spaces between frames) z pattern: direction that we read.

Here is another attempt at **// Comic Life //**. Having a source of images makes all the difference when using this software. If I were to decide to accept a comic life or a photo story in lieu of a written assignment I would have to announce this early so that the students could select and then take the necessary images.



**//Co-writer and write out loud//** are software packages which can assist in writing. There are speech options with both. Co-writer suggests words while you type. Write out loud reads what is written. When I misspelled physics in write out loud, it pronounced it wrong. I think that practice makes perfect for these two pieces of software. I am not there yet.