The Shelf life

  What stood out to me the most about cyberbullying is that it often accompanies face-to-face bullying and that the latter happens more often as the studies cited in the article From the Sandbox to the Inbox have shown (2015). It makes sense that cyberbullying is an extension of school-day occurrences.  This is what is so hard now in the days of social media, for bullied children there is no escape, no respite, even within a child’s own home. I had the misconception that cyberbullying would be more frequent due to the draw of its anonymity and how it allows the perpetrator to avoid the reaction. However, the popularity of the face to face bullying points to something different. The bullies want to experience the reactions, at least in the K-12 studies, which is what I am most interested in.  As the article points out bullying tends to spike from the middle school years through early high school (Faucher et al., 2015), which strikes me that there is a correlation between ...

  I want to start with a little bit of a sidebar.  When I was a Montessori teacher many years ago, I had many ways to teach writing to my young students. By far, the most popular choice for my kids was to use a shallow box filled with sand for them to practice drawing letters with their fingers. I have a theory that this method was a favorite due to its ephemeral quality: if the student messed up, all they had to do was shake the box, and the evidence was gone forever, with no paper trail. In Lucas John Jensen’s article, Integrating Social Media into Online Education , he sought to make his online classroom’s discourse more dynamic by putting it on Twitter (2019). However, I believe this is just a different stage for the same performance. In an in-person classroom during discussions, students are allowed to speak off the cuff without the worry of it being recorded,  referenced, and dissected word for word, as can happen when it is written in a post. Responses become more ...

  CAST.org is an excellent resource for learning all things UDL. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is defined on the site as “a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.” The purpose is to make learning accessible for the largest amount of students, both with and without learning differences. It breaks down the components of UDL into three main parts: engagement-the why of learning; representation-the what of learning; and action & expression-the how of learning.   (UDL: The UDL Guidelines, 2022) This handy graphic organizer can be found on the site at The UDL Guidelines .  CAST.org has spearheaded the development of a digital tool called Clusive an online adaptive environment “ designed to support the needs of diverse learners by making digital educational materials accessible, flexible, and engaging for all students”(CISL - Center on Inclusive Software for Learning at CAST, 2022...

  The hardware that I was curious about was the document camera. I had previously used one when working with a student who used a wheelchair and had limited mobility. It allowed him to see things at his level much easier and I was grateful to have that resource. In my research, I found that some document cameras have a lot more capabilities than I thought. The basic one that I used was a flexible armed camera that I could point down onto the paper I was writing on, etc., and project it onto the smartboard through the computer. The one I did research on, however, the IPEVO VZ-X,  has a microphone and the ability to record videos. It is a wireless version, so you do not need to be connected to a computer to use it, which leaves teachers free to walk around the classroom with the camera. Since the wireless version streams through WIFI, in classrooms that have 1-1 technology distribution, the students can stream the feed through their device.  https://store.ipevo.com/IPEVO-VZ...