Week+5

In Week 5 we received some really practical knowledge: the grand unveiling of the **SMART Board**! You can find out more about the SMART Board and the company that manufactures it (SMART Technologies) at their website []. The SMART Board **does have its short comings** but it was exciting to finally have the very common SMART Board brought into our room where we could play around with it. This week seemed to be the week to do it because on Friday my history class had a presentation where we learned even more tricks that we could do and discovered that this a **whole database of lessons that already exist online!**

Bruce opened up the class by showing us some examples of hooks that you could do with a smart board. The idea was to have a covered image that would slowly appear. Ironically enough (though I assume it was done on purpose) the hidden image turned out to be a picture of Dubai's famous palm tree shapped islands. I thought this was ironic because we're here in a class discussing how cutting edge technology can change the way we think, live and in particular educate. In Dubai we have an example of an entire country that we instantly associate with cutting edge technology being the norm and incredible architectural advancements.

We next moved onto the idea of **software** that was used with SMART boards and where it could be obtained. There is a package of SMART Board programs that are all useful in their own way but **SMART Notebook** seems to be the most popular. It can be downloaded as long as you have the serial key of a SMART Board from your school. In our particular case at the resource centre we can get all the software to use with the SMART Boards since the University of Ottawa has purchased a licence.

The next point that came up was the **OSSTF presentation on cyber bullying** that was conducted by a woman named Kerry. Cyber bullying is a **very important topic in today's classroom** as it can be very **difficult to monitor**. I unfortunately could not get a place at the presentation and could not attend. However we did get to hear what it was about. In this particular case the presentation focused on **new legislation** that is in **Ontario that forces schools to keep a "bullying record" that would follow students through their schooling careers**. I am torn on this issue, I don't know whether it is a good thing or not because while it allows students to have their bullying tracked, it means that students who do something stupid as kids are consistently labelled as being bullies wherever they go, even if they change schools. I am a firm believer that children learn by making mistakes and while bullying should be monitored and punished it is unfortunately a common thing that children do and we should be open to helping them learn from their mistakes and not simply label them as trouble for the rest of their education.

The next topic we cover was **Microsoft Photo Story** which is more or less slide show creating software. It is a fun program though very similar in its functionality to movie maker. Photo Story does however allow for **greater customization in how long pictures are shown with which music backgrounds. **

We then moved onto **assessment** and how we thought of students and the justification of marks. The most integral thing that Bruce talked to us about in this matter is to **have multiple types of assessments** and not simply ones that are good for a single student type and at the end of the day to think "is the student worth that mark?". We discussed and used **Markbook** briefly to see what it was about since it is the most widely used grading program around. It was exciting actually to see how much could be done in Markbook and how easily it organized data though the **"back up, back up, back up!"** idea is stressed to make sure that in case technological issues arise you don't lose all your work. Lastly we talked about [|www.turnitin.com] which is a tool that is used to **catch plagiarism**. **Unfortunately** though I dislike having to use it, we must in today's classroom to make sure that we **keep the integrity of educational system** from slipping. It would be **preferable to trust students** but unfortunately we don't have many options considering how **widespread plagiarism is becoming.**