Font is Important

I see all the time from both students and school staff, where unusual or fancy fonts are used. Students will use them for lab reports and it just comes off and unprofessional and a little annoying to read -- especially data tables. As for teachers, I sometimes have a hard time taking an e-mail seriously if the font is "kiddish." There is a time and place for those more creative fonts -- advertisements, parties, fairs, etc. Not for the professional world.

No, You Can't Be My Facebook Friend!

Chapter 9 of Richardson says when asked if a teacher should friend their students on facebook, "I would advise against it." I agree 100% with this. It's not the kind of relationship that you are meant to have with a student. Now, perhaps a graduate from a few years ago that you had in your class, that is perhaps a year away from a bachelors degree and taking on responsibilities such as looking for internships and building up a resume, sure. They were your student once, but how they are a young adult; far more mature and have more common sense on how to use a social networking site like facebook.

Old Ideas Can Still Be Good!

I found this article on "Think-Aloud" which is a much older education strategy. I use it from time to time in my classroom and always felt a little cautious while doing so, mostly because there seems to be such a big emphasis on using newer methods.

I was happy when I found this article because it does help emphasis that just because something is new does not mean that it is better.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/think-aloud-strategy-oldie-but-goodie-elena-aguilar?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EdutopiaNewContent+%28Edutopia%29

Protecting Identity

 So, I was reading the 7 things you need to known about google apps and I came across this section.

"From an administrative standpoint, Google doesn’t offer as much granularity in managing user accounts as many institutions want and need."

This was rather interesting to me because I do use a lot of apps from google, and I have put a lot of faith in them as a company. I suppose though, this is the drawback to the much more open and wider market for development that google supports where apple does not.