The Future

http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm

I just thought that I would post something that we may find useful since the majority of us are graduating in FOUR weeks!!! This site just shows the outlook for our line of work (teaching) in elementary, pre-school, middle and high school levels. Even if some of you, like me may be taking a different path than teaching this site is still very useful for researching any line of work you may be interested in. If by chance you are planning to move out of state, this is also useful because it gives information for each state as well. Hope you find this somewhat useful!

Healthy Child Healthy World

http://healthychild.org/


This website and book not only advocates to keep our children healthy but also give great tips about helping keep the world healthy. They have a book that is a user-friendly and practical lifestyle guide about how to reduce toxic exposure in our homes, our new book is a perfect resource of credible and easy steps to creating a healthier environment and lifestyle for all stages of parenting.It provides links to federal and state laws regarding health, gives chemical profiles on harmful chemicals that are in household products, a blog, ways to donate, volunteer, and become a member.

Purpose and Goals

• Expand awareness and understanding of environmental hazards to children's health
• Help the public learn about healthier practices, solutions, and products in the marketplace
• Encourage daily action and informed lifestyle choices
• Create standards and policies for safer products, foods, materials, and chemicals used in the home – promoting safer options and new alternatives
• Advocate for and support corporate policies and governmental legislation that protect children from environmental risks
• Engage communities to make wise choices and responsible decisions so families can flourish

how can this website increase awareness in the community? Would this be a useful tool in the classroom, as a parent, community member? How would you utilize this website/program?

Bullying in Schools

Recently, there have been many reports on the news and in newspapers about school bullying. Many teenagers are committing suicide due to bullying. Parents have sued schools, saying that it is the responsibility of the schools to deal with bullying.

The following programs/websites help deal with school bullying:

http://www.positiveaction.net/google/violence_prevention/
?gclid=CMPwne7QhZoCFShRagodInV9Kw

http://www.pacerkidsagainstbullying.org/
?gclid=COWO7-rPhZoCFSRPagodOg-1-w


The first program, Positive Action, is a science-based program that can be used to directly
teach violence prevention and reduce incidents of bullying. This program is proven
to decrease violent type behaviors in the classroom, on the playground, in communities,
and in homes. The program philosophy teaches students to treat others with the dignity
and respect with which they wish to be treated. This concept is the building block upon which success in violence prevention rests.

The second website is geared more towards children. It has games and videos that deal with the topic of bullying.

Do you think a program like Positive Action is a useful program for today's schools?
Do you feel the pacerkids website is a good resource for students?
What will you do as a teacher to deal with bullying?
Do you think schools should take more responsibility for cases of bullying or is it ultimately up to the parents?

Fighting the Battle of Childhood Obesity

http://www.ybhproject.org

http://www.healthcorps.net

These two programs are geared towards helping schools become aware of the importance of healthy eating and physical activity. The first program, YBH (Youth Becoming Healthy) was created by a woman who lost her brother due to complications of obesity. Her goal is to save as many youth as possible from the epidemic of obesity. Her program helps children to become more physically active and also educates them on the importance of adopting a healthy lifestyle. The program educates teachers and parents about healthy food choices and provides them with knowledge of how to create a healthy environment.

The second program, HealthCorps, is a proactive health movement founded by Dr. Mehmet Oz, to help stem the crisis of child obesity through school-based health education and mentoring, as well as community events and outreach to underserved populations.

What do you think about programs such as these? Do you feel they are important for today's schools? Who do you feel is responsible for addressing childhood obesity-parents, schools, or both? What will you do as teacher to help your students develop a healthy lifestyle?

Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, I thought it would be fun for everyone to find out what exactly their ecological footprint is. An Ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the earth's ecosystems. It compares what people take from the earth, and how quickly the Earth is able to replace what is taken. 

This website allows people to plug in their information to find out how large their ecological footprint is (trust me, you'll be surprised). This activity would be a great assignment for a teacher to give their students to take home and do with their families. This way, the whole family can see how much harm they are doing to the planet, and how to make appropriate changes. 

Here's the website, you all should really try it!

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/

It's Earth Day!

It's Earth Day! This is a fun, short video that can help young students learn about Earth Day. I think this would benefit future teachers because videos are very good at capturing the attention of young students and this video can help incorporate more technology into the classroom. Polly Bear is a little opinionated, but I think the video is a great resource to help teach kids how to help save the planet!

MyPyramid.gov

http://www.mypyramid.gov/index.html

MyPyramid.gov is a great website that provides loads of information about nutrition and the new food guide pyramid. I think future teachers would be interested in this website because it has a lot of resources for teachers to use in the classroom. For example, there are posters, worksheets, bookmarks, coloring sheets, etc. My favorite part of the website is the section for kids because it has fun, interactive games that will capture the attention of students while teaching them healthy eating habits. I think it is extremely important for students to start learning about nutrition at a young age because they will use the knowledge and skills they learn for the rest of their lives. It is also very important for parents to know about nutrition in order to teach their children and this website is great because it also has resources and tips for parents.

How could you incorporate this website into your own future classroom?

Disney and its Influence on Young Children

In a recent article, Henry Giroux, the cultural and literary critic, takes Disney to task for purposefully "infiltrat[ing] the most intimate spaces of children and family life. All the better to colonize and commodify the netherworld of childhood, their fears, aspirations and their future." Below you'll find some excerpts from the article. How do you find yourself responding to this commentary and the article in the New York Times, entitled "Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers," that spurred this reaction?

Here are some excerpts from Giroux's insightful article:

The potential for lucrative profits to be made off the spending habits and economic influence of kids has certainly not been lost on Disney and a number of other mega corporations, which under the deregulated, privatized, no-holds-barred world of the free market have set out to embed the dynamics of commerce, exchange value and commercial transactions into every aspect of personal and daily life. If Disney had its way, kids' culture would become not merely a new market for the accumulation of capital but a petri dish for producing new commodified subjects. As a group, young people are vulnerable to corporate giants such as Disney, who make every effort "to expand inwardly into the psyche and emotional life of the individual in order to utilize human potential" in the service of a market society.[4] Since children's identities have to be actively directed toward the role of consumers, knowledge, information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children's daily lives. In this instance, Disney, with its legion of media holdings, armies of marketers and omnipresent advertisers, set out not to just exploit young boys and other youth for profit; they are actually constructing them as commodities and promoting the concept of childhood as a saleable commodity.

What is particularly disturbing in this scenario is that Disney and a growing number of marketers and advertisers now work with child psychologists and other experts who study young people in order to better understand children's culture so as to develop marketing methods that are more camouflaged, seductive and successful.[5] For example, Disney's recent attempts to "figure out the boys' entertainment market," includes the services of Kelly Pena, described as "the kid whisperer," who in an attempt to understand what makes young boys tick, uses her anthropological skills to convince young boys and their parents to allow her to look into the kids' closets, go shopping with young boys and pay them $75 to be interviewed. Ms. Pena, with no irony intended, prides herself on the fact that "Children ... open up to her."[6]

Disingenuously wrapping itself in the discourse of innocence and family-oriented amusement in order to camouflage the mechanisms and deployment of corporate power, Disney's use of its various entertainment platforms, which cuts across all forms of traditional and new media, is relentless in its search for younger customers and its bombarding of young people incessantly with the pedagogy of commerce.[7] Under the tutelage of Disney and other mega corporations, children have become a captive audience to traditional forms of media, such as television and print, and, even more so, to new media such as mobile phones, MP3 players, the Internet, computers, and other forms of electronic culture that now seem to provide the latest products at the speed of light. Kids can download enormous amounts of media in seconds and carry around such information, images and videos in a device the size of a thin cigarette lighter. Moreover, "[media] technologies themselves are morphing and merging, forming an ever-expanding presence throughout our daily environment."[8] Mobile phones alone have grown "to include video game platforms, e-mail devices, digital cameras, and Internet connections," making it easier for marketers and advertisers to reach young people.[9] Kids of all ages now find themselves in what the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Center for Digital Democracy call "a new 'marketing ecosystem' that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, broadband video, instant messaging, video games, and virtual three-dimensional worlds," all of which provide the knowledge and information that young people use to navigate the consumer society.[10] Disney along with its researchers, marketing departments and purveyors of commerce largely control and services this massive virtual entertainment complex, spending vast amounts of time trying to understand the needs, desires, tastes, preferences, social relations and networks that define youth as a potential market. Disney's recent attempt to corner the young male market through the use of sophisticated research models, ethnographic tools and the expertise of academics to win over the hearts and minds of young people so as to develop strategies to deliver them to the market as both loyal consumers and commodities indicates the degree to which the language of the market has disengaged itself from either moral considerations or the social good. Disney claims this kind of intensive research pays off in lucrative dividends and reinforces the Disney motto that in order to be a successful company "You have to start with the kids themselves."[11]

Interactive Games for Kids

“Teachers around the world use Starfall.com and Starfall high-quality educational products as an inexpensive way to make the classroom more fun and inspire a love of reading and writing”

            http://www.starfall.com/ is a great web site for all students to use.  This interactive web site has games students can play that will help to reinforce learning in the area of reading.  This web site can be set up on any classroom computer and used as a part of a center or for fun.  This web site also teaches students about the calendar, Earth Day, ground hog day and other important facts that students learn about in class. This is a great tool to reinforce learning and to promote good reading skills in a fun and interactive way.

Hope this is useful.

Learn How Stuff Works

“HowStuffWorks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Discovery Communications, is the award-winning source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works. Founded by North Carolina State University Professor Marshall Brain in 1998, the site is now an online resource for millions of people of all ages.”

            www.howstuffworks.com is a great interactive web site for teachers, students and parents to use to learn HowStuffWorks.  In this web site you can learn how anything works like a toaster oven, volcano, car, cell phone, global warming and more. This web site is a great teaching tool and learning tool that can be used by students for projects or for other assignments.   There are different categories that you can choose from like science, animals, electronics, history, etc.  There are a mass of possibilities of what they can learn about on this site. 

            I use this web site from time to time and found it very helpful to use as a research tool for my projects.  So if a child is having trouble with their project you can turn them to this website.

            In a classroom, if you have a projector in your class you can display it for all the students to see. You can navigate through the site to show the students how to use it, and also choose something new for the students to learn.  You can also choose a subject based on what is being taught in the class at that moment like life science, history, animals etc. 

            I hope you guys enjoy this web site.

Bike Safety Lesson Plan

(I didn't know these existed)


http://www.saferoutestoschools.org/lessonplans.shtml

Here's a link to a website that has a lesson plan if you're ever interested in teaching bike safety. The website also has lessons for other safety lessons that have to do with safe ways of walking to school as well. The bike safety lesson plan demonstrates the importance of wearing a bicycle helmet by using raw eggs to show what could happen when not wearing one (sounds fun to me), and incorporates a video and different class discussions. I looked at many different lesson plans on this subject and this one really seemed to do a good job of getting kids to come up with their own reasons why biking is fun and how it can help the world, and also why it is important to be safe. It shows them more than tells them since telling them to "be safe" and "wear your helmet" isn't always effective.

How Kids Can Make A Difference Saving the Planet from A-Z

More than ever, we have become aware of our impact on our environment. As we begin to take the initiative of improving our Earth, it is highly important to involve our students. I think that as a future teacher it is not only effective but also beneficial for our students to be involved in changing our world. They need to know that they too can make a difference. On the tree hugging family website, there is a list of suggestions from A-Z that students can follow to make a difference. Under almost each letter, there is a link that they can click on or an example of how they can complete that task. Each task can then be completed by anyone and in addition, they can become a group effort.
Browse the website
http://www.treehuggingfamily.com/how-kids-can-make-a-difference-saving-the-planet-from-a-to-z/
How could this site be used in your classroom? What are some examples from the letters that you could use in your own classroom? Could this be beneficial to your class? Are there ways that you could integrate it into your curriculum?

Funbrain :)

Today teaching has become a circus act. Teachers constantly are juggling time management, students’ needs as well as ways to incorporate all areas of curriculum. Funbrain.com is a website that not only can be used for arcade type games but it also can be woven into your classroom curriculum. There are five components of the website: Kids, Parents, Quiz Lab, Free Games and Teachers. If you click on the link for teachers, you can access resources for your classroom. You can use the FunBrain Game finder to find games that are suitable for your classrooms needs depending the subject area and grade level. You can also use the Curriculum Guide to choose games that are appropriate for your class. The FunBrain Standards Finder bases activities based off the McREL standards. Lastly, you can use the FunBrain Math Flash cards to have the students practice on their own. I think that this site would not only interest your students but it would also allow you to extend what is being learned in a class lesson to be practiced on their own during groups and perhaps even at home. Most of the games are highly interactive, appropriate for all grade and learning levels as well as engaging. For the most part the students will not know they are learning (Especially in the Math Arcade)J
Explore the website for yourself.
http://www.funbrain.com/
What are the pros and cons of the site? Do you think it is beneficial to include technology into the classroom? If so, why? How would you use this site within your classroom planning?