Keeping Students Engaged and Excited

     Keeping students excited and engaged in their studies is one of the biggest challenges educators face in our schools today. Every school has some boring classes. Some students in these classes tend to loose focus on their school work because of the boredom in their classes. If students were actually excited about going to class because it was engaging, then grades would increase everywhere. It is not easy at all for a teacher to make a class engaging and exciting while at the same time teaching students everything they need to know. For many years the way of teaching has not changed much at all. There are some schools around the world that have found ways to complete this extremely difficult task of keeping students engaged and excited.
     Keeping your students excited and engaged has many positive benefits. There are ways to involve and engage students though. As stated in this website, pencil and paper is not fun, it is very boring in fact. Reading from textbooks and taking notes may take up the class period, but most students do not learn the information. Working in groups and discussing with other classmates to find answers to worksheets is much more engaging. Also for example in biology class we made power points about one chapter per group, and I learned much more by doing this opposed to taking notes. Review games are a fun way to make class engaging and exciting. I look forward to these review games because they are fun, but they also teach me a lot of information in the process. There are many other ways to keep students interested in your class, and also depending on what course it is, the ways of keeping students engaged will change. The goal teachers should have should be to make their classes something that students look forward to. Teachers should find a way to integrate games into their teaching, and if they do so they will find the many positive benefits an interesting class has.
     The way of teaching in schools needs to change. Teachers have been teaching students the same stuff for a long time. Everyday the world is becoming more advanced. As the world advances, so should the school system. If the school does not teach students up to date information, then they will start to become unprepared for the future of technology and other things. Taking notes and sitting at a desk all day is teaching of the past. Now with the aid of technology, classes should be more interactive and engaging. If teachers find new ways to keep students engaged and excited, then hopefully all students will learn and do well in school.

iPads Next Year

I believe that students should not be able to download whatever they want onto their iPads. I think the school should control what you download. If students are allowed to do whatever they want, many kids would get distracted very easily. Students would start downloading games and this would distract the students, causing their grades to drop greatly. Without these games or other apps, students would remain focused on their school work. If there is a way teachers can control the use of games, such as being able to look at your screen, then it would be alright to download items onto the iPad. If there is nothing like this, then nothing should be downloaded. Some students might be very angry at the end of the day because they have an iPad but they cant play games. Once they see that their grades remain well because they do not have games on their iPad, then they will be pleased.

'No Homework' Debate Finds Support in New Jersey

These parents in new jersey think that homework is taking up to much of the students time and it is effecting their health. I think that they are right for homework during the week. Most students have sports or other extracurricular things to do after school. This takes up time and limits the available time students have to do their work. This leads to students staying up late at night. By staying up late this is effecting the students health because they are not getting the amount of sleep they need. With limited sleep because of homework, it is actually effecting the grades students get during the school day. Therefore homework during the week can lead to a decrease in grade. This is why I think that students should only get homework on the weekends where they have extended time to do it and it is not affecting anyones sleep in the end. I think the new jersey parents should not take away homework completely, but just push to limit homework only to the weekends.

Online Learning

Technology has opened up many more oppertunities for school. The internet has been incorporated into education in many places around the world now. The internet could spell the end of snow days, as said in this article. Some places around the school no longer have snow days because of online learning. Many schools, like mine, still have no school when there is snow out. These snow days can really affect students because it sets them off track of thier education when they have a snow day, and it cuts down on the days of vaction you have over the summer. Some schools do not have to do this now. Many schools are now starting to use online classes when there are snow days. This allows students to have a longer summer vacation which is great. Hopefully soon all of these advances will be added to every school.

Common Sense Media

This website is a great website to help students and parents understand the major issues around digital citizenship. This website promotes good online citizenship by posting sites that show good citizenship and there are no links to bad websites. On this website there is a option that contains tools and curricula To teach students about becoming responsible digital citizens. Also there is a search box that has a suggestion to search advice on digital safety. Overall this website is a good place to go to find information about good digital citizenship.

Is Google Making More People Want to use the Internet

Google has been coming out with many new applications. Today during class I was introduced to Google music beta. This is an application that allows you to upload music from your iTunes or other device so that you can access it on the Internet. There are many more applications that take things that usually can only be accessed from one device, to be accessed from anywhere where you can get Internet. Examples of this are google documents and google presentation where you can share word documents or PowerPoint presentaions to anyone with gmail, and you can access it anywhere also. So instead of having to carry a computer around or a USB drives you can just go on google docs and download an essay or project very easily. I believe that all of these advances are attracting more and more people everyday.

Google Fast Flip

"Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches" (Google News). Fast Flip is a great application to use. If you want to view any article from anywhere all you have to do is type in a topic in the search box at the top of the page. This website organises the online pages into different sections such as: popular, sections, topics, sources. I recommend this website to anyone who is interested into recent news stories and news and information from different sources from around the world.