"I Love the Movies"

Hopefully my sister and I aren't the only people that think the Great Movie Ride at MGM Studios in Disney World is freaking hilarious! Haha, seriously, "I love the movies."

But seriously, video media in the classroom- I'm for it! I definitely think it can be pretty distracting, and even ineffective if used too often, but everybody loves a good flick! If the video clip is short and engaging I think it can be monumental in getting the students excited about a topic. I even believe in a movie day or two each semester as a reward for good behavior- I loved those as a kid... when they weren't rated R and I didn't have to leave the classroom and go sit in with the ESL kids... that wasn't much fun...

Anyways, I used to make movies ALL the time when I was a kid. We used my dad's super old-school VHS camcorder that weighed about 20 pounds! Me and my friends made all sorts of crazy cool movies (and my sister was literally EVERY girl character in EVERY movie, haha) Those were the days!

the Jtrain Biology Class Website

Here it is, my website. Hopefully it is cool and done right.

http://sites.google.com/site/biologyjtrain/home

2.0 Exploring

Okay, the PLN video titled "Building a PLN with Web 2.o Tools" was pretty hard for me to follow. The analogy of a PLN being like a buffet made me pretty hungry, but didn't really give me much information. I liked the reference to 'second life', which I remember Dwight Schrute playing in an episode of The Office...

Anyways, I was of the misunderstanding that a PLN was another Google Reader type thing that gathered, condensed, and organized everything for you. Now I know that it is pretty much just the accumulation of everything that I do to connect, share, and learn with other people across the globe. I already have a pretty good handle on personal networking sites like facebook and other things we have covered in class (blogs, RSS feeds, etc), so I decided to take a look at some of the links on the Creating a PLN website.

I think the education communities like

http://teachershare.scholastic.com and http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/

could be incredibly useful for teachers like us who are just getting started. There are a whole ton of "mentor" teachers out there who have lots of experience and lots of great teaching ideas. We can use the resources and information to become effective and insightful teachers. Then, when we're old and gray, we can give back to the community the way we were given. It's like the teaching circle of technological life!