ECOMP 6012: The Bullied

A summary of chapter 3, "The Bullied," in the book: The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander by Barbara Coloroso for my Masters course on Cyberbullying. This presentation was a collaboration between myself and three of my course colleagues.

The Bullied

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ECOMP 5004: Website Evaluation

The Awesome Highlighter

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Site Description: 

The Awesome Highlighter, referred to sometimes as AH, was started by three guys from Florida. According to their Facebook page, the company was founded in February on 2008. There are no names provided for the founders or who maintains the site, only an online form to request support.

Classroom Use:

This web tool gives students the ability to use a digital highlighter on any webpage of the Internet. Students can highlight text as well as pictures. AH provides a toolbar at the top of the page for students to add a virtual sticky note to the page, access their “Help” menu, and best of all: change their highlight color. 

Once a webpage has been highlighted, students then click the “Done” button on the toolbar. They are taken back to AH and are shown an overview of the information they have highlighted. Students may then choose to email the notes, copy them to the clipboard, or share their notes via variety of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Students may also copy the unique URL provided at the top of the page for later access. There is also an option beneath the summary for the student to return to the page to add additional notes and/or edit the notes they have already highlighted.

AH can also be used by teachers who would like to point students to important and/or specific information on a webpage. Teachers could use the sticky notes tool to instruct students on what they need to do with the information on the webpage. Here is an example of AH in action: http://awurl.com/3zTmJLYRh

State Standards Connections:

Maine Leaning Results (MLR)

English Language Arts

A. PROCESS OF READING
MIDDLE GRADES 5-8

7. Summarize whole texts by selecting and summarizing important and representative passages.

H. RESEARCH-RELATED WRITING AND SPEAKING

MIDDLE GRADES 5-8

7. Use search engines and other Internet resources to collect information for research topics.

Recommendation:

With the presence of technology in schools and the classroom today, using the Internet as a research resource has become a common occurrence. In fact, when given the choice many students will turn to the Internet before accessing more traditional resources. In my school, the current standard operating procedure is for students to print out the Internet resources they find. This translates into a lot of printing and a lot of wasted printing supplies, since webpages often do not print neatly onto an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper. Awesome Highlighter gives students the ability to pick out the important pieces of information on a webpage and refer to those notes for use later when they write their reports. If students are working collaboratively on a research project, AH allows team members to easily share their web notes with one another.

I think this is a great tool for teachers who want to move closer to working completely within the digital environment. Awesome Highlighter makes it easy for both student and teacher to takes notes on webpages and then save those notes for later reference or for sharing with others. The add/edit tool, in tandem with the different highlighter color tool, could also be a vehicle for collaborative activities. While the site does have a login so that you can save your highlights on their system, use of AH is free and does not require registration to use. 

However, as with any web-based tool there are a few glitches in AH that users should be aware of. For example, the “+ add a note” tool often takes several seconds to respond (I was having to wait upward of 5-8 seconds for the note to actually appear). In addition, when using the add/edit tool to return to the webpage your previous highlights are not displayed on the page save only the last item you had highlighted. This could create confusion for students and discourage them from using this service. There is an available AH add-on for the Firefox browser they may improve the performance of this web tool. The service also offers a feedback section to leave comments on their service, so I forwarded this concern to them in the hopes they will make this tool more robust and reliable.

Magazine Media Literacy: Step Two

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5C: Select ONE magazine that you normally would not read. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  Us Magazine
2. Explain why you  wouldn’t be interested in the magazine you’ve selected.  This magazine is all about celebrities and the exploration of not just the work they do but what goes on in their lives as well. Reading about the lives of such famous people would not be my first choice, not that I haven’t sat down in the break room at work and read a similar magazine, but in those situations it is more out of boredom than interest. If the articles are about what the person is doing for work then that’s fine. It’s when the articles are about what their person is doing in the private life that often times turns me off, especially when the tone of the article comes across as exploitive and intrusive. To read such articles I feel disrespects their right to privacy and encourages the paparazzi to continue to stick their noses/cameras where perhaps they shouldn’t be.
3. Are there offensive stories or ads?  Some of the articles, those that seem intrusive, I would consider offensive because if I were in their shoes I would not appreciate that level of invasion into my private life. What I found truly offensive was the constant notices from my web browser that it had prevented the site from opening a pop-up window. It is bad enough the number of animated ad banners strewn about the webpages, but the pop-up windows cross the line because they are a popular vehicle through which viruses and malware are delivered.
4. Are you simply not the targeted audience?  Based on the ads for female clothing, cosmetics, and other products I would guess that I am not part of their target audience.
5. Are you not amenable to the techniques of persuasion the magazine uses?  The magazine clearly uses the two basic persuasion techniques of beautiful people and celebrities to draw readers in. If you can find the text within the forest of images, many headlines use intensifiers to get the reader to click on the article.
6. Are there images that you object to?  The majority of the images posted throughout the articles are of celebrities at public events, on the set of a television or movie productions, or from photo shoots. Anyway has to be ready for themselves to show up on someone’s camera at such events regardless of who you are, so I don’t find these images offensive. It’s the images taken with telescopic lenses that intrude on the celebrity’s privacy that I have an issue with, but I didn’t see any images like these on Us’s website.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://www.usmagazine.com/

Magazine Media Literacy: Step One

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5B: Select ONE magazine that is online and captures your interest. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  The Week
2. Who is the target audience?  It took some digging, but under the link at the bottom of their site entitled “AD INFO” I found a brief description of their intended audience: the “busy executive.” Now, I’m by no means an executive or anywhere near it, but I am busy being a teacher and a learner. [http://ads.theweek.com/ad_info/home.php]
3. What are the titles of a few articles?  One of the reasons why I like to read this magazine is because of its variety in articles from national and international stories to both written and video entertainment. On Wednesday, June 1st the following articles were available for reading:
   ~“The House’s ‘phony’ debt-ceiling vote: A win for the GOP?”
   ~“Can a ‘general amnesty’ save Syria’s Assad?”
   ~“Could solar panels on the moon power the Earth?”
   ~“Is 4 years old too young for kindergarten?”
4. What kinds of visual images are displayed?  Almost every article heading is paired with a photograph or illustration meant related to the topic. Opinion articles are tagged will illustrations of the authors. Almost every page contains sections with images and title headings that try to connect the reader to other stories, from a “featured articles” box to a “Must Clicks” horizontal header bar. Sometimes these images are paired with the article titles and other times subject areas (e.g. opinion, technology, lifestyle). And of course, what news magazine would not be without a political cartoons section (and I’ll admit to it, this is one of my favorite sections).
5. What are typical advertisements selling?  First and foremost the website has advertising for itself spread throughout the site. The majority of the self-ads promote subscribing to their magazine in paper form, followed next by downloading their iPhone or Android app. (these are currently free). The site does support advertisements from a variety of businesses including other news outlets, hotels, manufacturing, information technology and service-oriented businesses.
6. What techniques of persuasion do the articles, images and ads use?  In their “about us” section they use the basic persuasion technique of intensity, stating that they pull news from the best sources and cover the latest developments in a variety of news categories. In ads, when you look at how many times and in how many places they advertise themselves via subscriptions or their portable app. you can’t help but thing of the repetition form of persuasion. Within some of the articles I sense some advanced card stacking persuasion going on or rather, an attempt to remove this persuasion from the issue being discussed in that commentators are responding to an initial author statement and debate its merits, including additional information and/or disputing other data. Sometimes I will take what might be considered the very basic approach of noting to which side of the room a commentator seems to lean, specifically the commentator who speaks first in the article and who speaks last, essentially getting the last word for the story.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://theweek.com/