the H1N1 virus advancment

This week I read a blog titled H1N1, Skype, and a Possible Tipping Point by Karl Fisch. It talks about how even though kids have the flu; they are still participating in their daily school life. How you ask. The students do something called skyping. What is skyping though? After further research, I learned that skyping is basically just talking through webcam. Skyping allows you to participate from another location. To me this was different and above expectations, but hey, it’s Arapahoe. If I was sick or any of my friends were sick, I know that my friends or I would not even want to think about school. Not that we are bad students but if it were you, what would you do. I agree with Mr. Fisch when he says “the students want to participate” and “the impressive thing is the student’s willingness to be connected to the class when they are home feeling crummy.” It’s obvious how much these students wanted to learn and get involved.
In the blog, he also talks about how this could be a turning point for our society. He states this because it is advancement in our daily lives with our technology. Instead of being at home sick with the flu doing nothing, we can now be in class when we’re home sick. The H1N1 virus is sweeping across the globe and it is making people absent from school, work, ect. We don’t have to miss class any more over this epidemic because we have tools like Skype to help us get involved.

Swine Flu Vaccine

For my world news article I read U.S. to share swine flu vaccine globally by Associated Press. It talks about how we are going to share the vaccine of swine flu, also called H1N1 virus, worldwide. If they go through with this then I think it would be a great accomplishment for not only the United states but for other countries. The World. the United States says that they are working with other countries, Austrailia, Brazil, France, Italy, New Zeland, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and sharing different vaccines. that is the part that struck me. Why does the world have multiple vaccines? What if one of them doesn't work? Why cant the world just have one super vaccine? I think that they should make it a law or something that you have to go to the doctor about once a month to check if you have swine flu until the epidemic is cured. School and other major things are getting shut down because of it. At Hospitals if you don't get a flu shot by a certain time then you have to wear a mask. At church one day, we couldn't even make physical contact because a kid at 6the church's school was infected. If we find a cure for this then there would be no more school shut downs. t would be a huge success.

Speech! (education blog)

In The Obama Speech by Will Richardson talked about how he thinks schools should show speeches during the day. He has a strong opinion about this because where is a better place to discribe something then where you learn the most. I agree with most of this. The part i don't agree with is if you don't want to watch the speech you don't have to. The only thing is you could be missing some valuble information and that is your fault. At school, a debate can start and really get kids thinking. New ideas and new perspectives of things can blossum while talking about a speech or even a piece of text. Like he says talking about speeches at schools can make us have a different veiw on the world fom just one opinion. His last sentence in the article says " But without that, any way you look at it, this is not a great moment for schools." I think this is one hundred percent true. schools can't do as much as they want to because some parent wont let the school do that.

The New Literacy and the Machines Are Us Blog

Clive Thompson’s new literacy asked the question, is technology is making us bad writers. I would have to agree with this statement because we are so used to the helpful tools like spell check and grammar check on Microsoft word and other applications like that. We get so lazy when we are handwriting a letter or a piece of writing because we are so used to technology doing it for us. This could make us get lower grade at school. For example; we just came back to school and we could probably write better when we were at the end of eighth grade then we can now. I believe this because over the summer people texted and emailed a gigantic amount. In most cases when you are texting or writing an email you don’t think about using grammar and we say thins like “R u sk8ng 2marow.” So when we come back to school we are not used to writing correctly and formally. Another thing that shocked me was when the author said “the fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing.” When I thought about that I saw that it was true. When you write for an audience its different then when you’re just writing to be writing. In my opinion when you’re writing for nothing its better work then when you’re writing for an audience.
The machines are us/using us is about how technology is advancing so much. We can link to any where with one click. One thing that struck me is how it said you have to think about copyright, family and other things. And when we write things we really do have to think about some of those things. Also you can make a web page by literally just typing in a few things I think it is just like the other article because it is pretty much saying, technology is doing all the work for us. I agree with both of these statements about these articles.