Samantha’s Blog

This kid is sooo adorable! videos come up on my homepage and this was one of them and i loved it so much i had to put it on here for everyone to see! This kid is like four years old! He amazes me

Ok so it has taken me a while but I have started blogging in the classes I am supposed to be mentoring! The one class only has five students, and I am REALLY excited about this class! For one thing, they have all been blogging about math, and that is what I am going to major in! For another it is the grade I think I want to teach! Because the class is so small I will be able to read all their posts and should really get to know some things about these students! So far I have read a handful of each of the students blogs and am excited to continue! Also the teacher seems really nice so I am just all round glad about getting this class!

I havent figured out the other class yet, how to blog with them etc. but when I do i will definitely write a post about their class too!

So i added a whole bunch of blogs to my google reader, mostly teacher related things because I wanted to get a feel of how teachers are using these tools in the classroom. One blog i added was a person who actually came and did a lecture in my EPS class, Alex Couros

He did a really good job at presenting to our class so i went and read some of his blog posts and came across a blog post that really caught my attention: Self Child-Pornography This was a blog refering to an article about a young girl who sent pictures of herself nude to her classmatess. The consequences of this act are very critical! She could be registered as a sex offender for twenty years!

What i dont understand is why a girl, or any person, would want to put pictures of themself on the internet. It is such a desperate cry for attention, it is sad! Also, it seems like the punishment is almost unfit, because she is getting charged as a sex offender. Of course she was the one who was distributing the child pornogrophy, but it seems contradictory to charge someone underage with a charge that is used to protect people underage. If it is her that is putting the pictures out, it is her offending herself, but she has made that choice… but is still adding to the mass amounts of child pornogrophy in the world! I have mixed feelings because it seems contradictory yet needs to be punishable, but maybe that way needs to be modified. I mean, if a underage girl sends her underage boyfriend a picture of herself in compromising situations, is that something that would be charged for sex offender? If so… there would be many many more charges… Or did this girl who got charged get the punishment she did because she sent it to so many people.

What if a girl sent that picture to one person then that picture got leaked throughout the community… would she be the one charged?

I know that there was a girl in my community that used to send pictures like that to pretty much everyone… and she was like in grade eight… it was terrible. Should she have been charged? Maybe if she would have, she wouldnt have turned out the way she did, and would have been more careful about the image she set herself up to have.

Not only was i interested in the topic, but i saw different ways of blogging! It was thought provoking and engaged readers to form their own opinions on the subject! As a teacher I want to be able to do that with my students everyday.

Colours of Me

I dont really want to say anything about this, I would rather have people looking at it and form their own thoughts and conclusions rather than read why I made this picture the way I did. If you cant read the writing in the borders, im sorry haha it didnt save very well… i just used paint because my adobe photoshop wasnt loaded on my laptop just my computer at home. if you cant read it just post and i will put them up. I used my new like favorite site ever to find the pictures… flickr . The pictures were meant to be read starting in the top left hand corner then go counter clockwise!

top: Take a chance on people… step into the shoes of another… colour with all the crayons in your box… and give everyone a taste of what you got.

right: somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

bottom: rainbows are a wonder of nature… a gift after the storm… our world is full of rainbows… we just need to take time to accept and appreciate them.

left: In order to have friendship you must look past the colour to the soul because within the soul lies a rainbow of many colours.

I originally wanted to do this right… video’s, voice over, music, i wanted to do it all! Then i realized that my ambition is a lot higher than the amount of free time I ever have, so here is the mastercard commercial I made movie maker style!
I got all of my pictures from Flickr Creative Commons which is like my new favorite site, it shows the amazing pictures people have!

So I have come to realize that at university you meet a lot of people… no I am not stupid I already knew that, but what i didn’t realize was how much you start to rely on those people! In every single class i have gotten the phone number or email of someone, not just to like make friends and talk, but to help with school! In high school i was so used to having time to work on projects during class, or assignments, with my friends and partners without always having to meet outside of school. Here all of my classes are just one long lecture, and any homework I have i have to contact friends after class! Not even kidding every week i am on msn with alanna figuring out my math homework! This week i had to text my bio partners about my labs, and will have to email them a lot to finish our group project!
I have never used my school email account until this year. Every single year I have had one I had maybe five emails all together, and I have used mine hundreds of times more than that this year in just a couple months! I can email my profs, classmates, and it is the email I have used for ECMP 355.
I have not been much of a group learner, so working with other students has been different for me this year, and even more so different because I do it mainly through texts and email!

I watchedSugata Mitra: Can Kids Teach Themselves

This was the man who set up the hole in the wall experiment, and it was really cool how he tested his ideas. Its about how children can learn on their own, and especially in groups. When they are taching themself they work in groups, and cooperatively they come to a final understanding together. Mitra put a computer just in a hole in a wall in india and within 8 minutes a thirteen year old boy had taught himself how to browse and use the internet, and at the end of the day something like 70 children had an understanding of how to use the computer. He also said that it isnt just a hands on thing, but more of a cooperative thing, because there is only one child who can be working the computer, but three or four kids would be around them and learn exactly the same amounts and the same concepts, and then you could have a whole group of kids around just watching and they could learn the same things. Once one kid would learn it they would continue to teach it to another, so it was a kind of chain effect.

Mitra did this experiment over lots of different places, and in one of them he left the computer for three months and the students had taught themself somewhere around two hundred english words in a place where no one spoke english. They were using the words in the right context in everyday language and told him that he needed to get them a faster processor and better mouse.

It was a really cool video because it makes you think about the way different students learn and made me think of how i can have different approaches in a classroom so that students can all learn in their own way. On the comments someone asked if the same thing would work for adults, and I wonder the same question, so that would be something cool to test out.

so movie maker was fun! haha kristine thought of an awesome idea soooo we created our masterpiece! It is pretty amazing i must say!

How do you feel about clouds?
That water tasted like… green…
hahahahahahahahahaha

I have been thinking a lot lately about drinking and driving. Today a person passed away from drinking and driving, and it really hit me hard. I didn’t even know this person, just the brother of a friend of a friend of mine, yet I havent been feeling normal all day. It makes me take into consideration how many people are affected by drinking and driving.

About three years ago a student at my school, a graduate from peacock upgrading at vanier, passed away from a drinking and driving accident. His best friend decided to get behind the wheel and drive home and caused the accident. This was a really hard time for my school, and i imagine all the schools in moose jaw. Going to a catholic school, we prayed for this person every day. I know the brother, and he has been affected dramatically. The way he and his friends look at drinking while under the influence is not the same… which it shouldn’t be.

Two years ago three members of the hockey team in Moose Jaw were hit by a drunkk driver going home from a game. Two of the members had to watch as their team mate and friend was removed from the car with the jaws of life. He was in a comma for a while, but he managed to pull through. He is lucky to have his life… but his life is not even close to the same as it was before the accident. His body is not in the condition to play sports anymore, so he will never get to play hockey again, which has changed his dreams and his entire future.

Last year I have a friend that was given a full ride scholarship to a college in the states to play baseball, a huge opportunity. He lost his scholarship, position on the team, and place in the school when he decided to drive drunk. While driving under the influence he got into an accident… which lead to the many serious consequences.

Just a couple weekends ago I spent my saturday night driving along the highway looking for a friend. At 12:00 am me and my friend got a call saying that this friend was very drunk and decided to get in his car and drive to davidson, and got lost on the way to chamberlain. The continued to tell us that he phoned and didn’t know where he was, and that he was passed out along the side of the highway. Me and my friend drove all the way to chamberlain looking for him, the whole way sick with the senarious we had created as to what had happened. Going over Buffalo Pound was the hardest, imagining him going off the side into the water… This friend drives fast normally, but deciding to drive fast, drunk, on a very windy night was so incredibly stupid. I wanted to see his car parked on the side of the road so much i was sick from worry. Not only was i scared of what happened to my friend, i was really worried he would be the car coming towards us, trying to drive back to moose jaw, and he would lose control and hit us. I wasn’t driving, one of my friends was, and in the end we couldnt find him and she took me and my one friend home because she didn’t really want to waste the gas trying (that sounds harsh and i’m a little bitter about it, but me and my friend chelsea wanted to find him because we were the ones that knew him, and we would have stayed out all night to find any one of our friends…) I tried calling him and he wouldnt answer, so i was pretty worried. At home i kept on getting mad at myself because i could have been at that party and prevented him from driving. It is still hard to believe that his friends would let him get behind the wheel and drive. In the morning i got a text saying he was ok, and i wasn’t as worried. I found out later that day that he woke up around 3, sleeping outside his car, his keys in the ditch… outside of tuxford. He phoned and said he was in turtleford and he was on his way home…

In the first case it was a friend who was driving… a friend who, under the influence, decided to risk his life and the life of his best friend… and the consequence was fatal. I cant even imagine how i would feel if i ever harmed my friend, from doing something that was completely avoidable… i would probably never drink or drive again, let alone together. It is hard to believe that a friend would risk your life… and lately i have found that teenagers dont all take drinking and driving as seriously as i do. You would think when members of the community have been so affected by drinking and driving they would learn a lesson from it. I have a friend who has thought it was ok to drive me home while drunk before, without me really realizing it, and i will never let it happen again. I have never been more mad in my life, because i trusted my friend with my life driving me home, and she took advantage of that. Recently she planned on driving a bit out of town and then drinking and driving us back. . . and luckily i had not been drinking so i could drive everyone. I was very mad at that friend, as it has not been the first time and she really doesn’t see it as a big deal. I am trying to make her realize how serious it is, but i wonder if she, like many many people, ever will.

The friend that lost his scholarship still drinks and drives. After such a life altering mistake, he still hasn’t learned his lesson. I have come to the point where i wont talk to him when he is drunk because i just can’t handle worrying about if he will get home from the bar or not… Which leads to the bars. So many people just drive home from the bar, instead of calling a taxi… a small price to pay to save your life. I will not drive around when the bars are closing… so i always try to get myself home around one thirty, when i’m in moose jaw.

Deaths from drinking and driving are almost completely avoidable. When you get hit by a drunk driver it is the most terrible thing… because what can you do right? I have never drank and drove… and i dont plan on ever doing it. The best situation you can have when you are drinking and driving is a DUI… the other option is an accident. That is, of course, if you are lucky enough to have nothing happen… EVERY time you decide to get behind the wheel drunk you are risking your own life, the life of those your driving, and the lifes of all those around you… is it really worth it?