Are we meeting our students needs?

KSU’s Professor Wesch and his cultural anthropology students have brainstormed how students learn and created a video summarizing the results of their surveys.

A Vision of Students Today

Is our school environment similar to that depicted in the video? Are we helping our students prepare for the next 50 years — or even 5 years — of their lives? If not, what do we have to change to accomplish that?

Speedlinking — Microsoft Tips

Windows Live One Care — This free service will check your computer for viruses, remove junk and improve performance.

8 Tips for better holiday photos – With Christmas fast approaching, these tips will help improve family photos.

10 Tips for maintaining a healthy home network — Whether running one computer or several computers in your home, many of these tips are essential for projecting your computer system.

Maintenance Tasks that Improve Performance — Is your computer sluggish? These tasks will help boost its performance by cleaning up unused “stuff”

Organize your photos — brief instructions on how to tag photos in Windows XP and Windows Vista

AR Is Failing Our Students

What is the purpose of Accelerated Reader in our curriculum? Is it to improve our students’ ability to read? If so, then it is currently failing to meet that purpose since it limits what the student may read to meet that classroom requirement.

• We have very few AR tests on non-fiction books, including biographies.
• Purchasing procedure limits the ability to add new books. Research is showing that teens want to read the currently popular books.
• AR tests are not available for all books
• Popular adult authors that teens would enjoy do not have AR tests (Danielle Steel and Robin Cook books have been removed from the library because students weren’t reading them. They weren’t reading them because they didn’t have an AR test. Prior to AR these were popular authors with students.)
• AR tests do not exist for magazines

Because of these limits, many students are reading only to fulfill a classroom assignment and not because they are enjoying what they are reading. Thus, many of them do not read. Perhaps we need to look at what the students enjoy reading as a means to improve their ability to read. The senior blogs in response to the question, “If the saying is true, ‘You are what you read,’ then what are you?” reinforced a lot of what was presented by Rollie Welch about teen reading, particularly what the guys read. These blogs indicate the students are reading

• Sports biographies [male]
• Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, Slam Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Outdoor Life (magazines) [male]
• Comic books (graphic novels) [male]
• Romances [female]
• Murder mystery [female] [male]
• Problem / death [female]
• Fantasy [male]
• Western [male]
• Friendship [female]
• Relationships [female]
• Suspense [female]
• Sports page (newspaper) [male]
• Sports message boards (Internet) [male]
• News [male]
• Horror / suspense [male / female]

 How will we use this information?  Will we change the purchasing procedure to

• Purchase books more often (fewer at a time)
• Purchase AR tests for non-fiction
• Purchase more sports magazines
• Add graphic novels to the collection

Will we allow students to read materials that don’t have an AR test to fulfill the classroom requirement? If we truly want to improve reading, then we need to capitalize on the enjoyment behind the reading.

Social Networking

Why join Facebook (or any other social network site)?

Our students are way ahead of us when it comes to social networking. Most of the seniors started participating as freshman on Xanga. From Xanga, they migrated to MySpace and are now primarily on Facebook. For our students, the use of Facebook is a daily activity. Several students recently completed essays on the value of social networking. Below are some of the reasons why students believe social networks have value:

• Organizing events and invite anyone on his/her friends list. This is done frequently around Seneca
• Serve as a way to keep in touch with friends. … With a social network I keep in touch with kids that … range as far to Kansas City, Wichita, Manhattan, and Emporia.
• Personally, I find it very entertaining to read some students in our schools interests or their summaries about themselves.
• Can be a great chance for a person to express themselves.
• Schools and social networking are starting to become more intertwined. Personally I have at least three classes in which we use Moodle to give out assignments, information, and other things needed for the class
• Stay in touch with my friends and classmates … share photos and videos with them … compete with them in gaming applications.
• Keep up with what’s going on in my friend’s lives –stay in contact with everyone I’ve met through out forensics
• Schedule events easily … click on a link to an interactive calendar with a list of upcoming events.
• Keep up with the music business, … I can keep track of tour dates, new music releases, and any other information they choose to release.
• Games and other fun activities
• When creating an online profile, people have the chance to show their best qualities and interests. They do not worry about being judged or made fun of because they are not “cool”.
• Social networks allow people who share interests to become friends.
• My aunt who lives in Alabama sends us photos of her children since we rarely see them. We get see how they are changing and growing up without actually seeing them in person.

Social Networks in Plain English