Words Big As the Screen

What an encouraging article. A big part of what my "research" is is the buy-in aspect of maintaining and using Yugtun here in our region. I appreciated reading this article in saying that, that Natives should be 'researching" for themselves and not just have outsiders speak for us.
I also appreciated the message that native languages are not just something, "incapable of expressing abstract thoughts" but should be used for things like "...educational advancement, economic achievement, and recognition beyond the village or reservation." I think a lot of people who don't "buy-into" the Yugtun language have been programmed to think these thoughts, that our language is "old" and from a long time ago. I have a tendancy to think that some people from my generation equate maintaining the language into living in the past. I would love for us to create a webpage, or a computer screen like the Hawaiians to have Yugtun words instead of English. I think that would be a way to kick the idea that Yugtun is old and used only for hunting and fishing (or whatever "village", "old") way that it's seen. I know this because I used to think that way too in high school and college. I used to think, "Why should I speak Yugtun when it sounds so glutter-y and rough?" For me, it's so much more than that. I still can't believe it took me such a long time to finally appreciate my language in the way that I do now. Thank God! (Can I say "God"?)

Powerpoint Papers

My idea of making a powerpoint is to do one for my animal unit, which I've started teaching. I think using the powerpoint method to create a webpage for my students is going to be a fun activity. I'm wanting to combine teaching powerpoint and the animal unit together if that's possible. After reading the two powerpoint papers and having seen Angass'aq's family page, I'm excited to develop one for my fourth grade students. What was exciting was when I read Cathy's paper, she mentioned teaching students vocabulary and recording them. Each student is going to research an Alaskan animal we are learning about. I'm thinking after researching the animal because students need to learn the name, what they eat, where they live, how their body structure helps them to survive and to include a not-so-known fact about them, after that I think it would be awesome if each kid is able to give a short report or something when they click on an animal. What I liked about Angass'aq's page was that it was interactive, and I'm hoping to make one like it. I hope to learn a lot more of powerpoint than I do now, which is just to use powerpoint for presentation purposes.
After reading the papers, I have two questions: If I am to publish this hopeful student-generated work, how would I get around the copyright laws mentioned, because I know we'll get our animals from the internet? And is this idea of having an animal page going to be too big to save onto a webpage (because both papers mentioned having too big size, memory, megabytes or whatever when they created theirs)?

Laptops and Abdullah's Blog

We have laptops for the students here at AE and I identified with a statement from the article when she said, "My classroom, supposedly a zone for deep analysis and honest commentary, had become a mini police state, with me as the chief of police" p. 3. Several weeks ago, when I had my students type up their plant reports, we had several students playing around with a new program we didn't have on last years laptops: iphoto. They were also going into the web to look for cartoons to watch. Luckily though, we only use the computers for Word processing (so far) for an hour at a time because the other classes need them also. When I read this article I thought, "So lucky!" If we had laptops for all the students at AE, I would love it only because we would use them to look up stuff on the web and to write up our reports. Having to share our computers here is tough because with much use, they get dirty and we can't use them whenever and as much as we'd like. I can see the problems that McFarlane would have to use them a lot. I just how lucky we are not to have to use them as much as it seems they do in this school.

Abdullah's Blogging: A Generation 1.5 Student Enters The Blogosphere
What I liked about this article was the argument from Graff (1989) and using blogging as a way to communicate and look at critical literacy. If I were to use blogging in my classroom, I think I would get a lot out of how a group of kids think. I liked how grammar and spelling were not a concern and how using the oral base of their language was brought to life when talking about plagiarism. I can understand why Sabine has us each blog our ideas down, but it would be interesting to see how it look if one person were to blog a comment and we were to expound, agree/disagree upon it like we do if we were sitting in a class (and we all know that our class was not shy to do it last summer). I learned so much when we were together to talk about our articles. I know that we had some tense moments, but we learned and grew from them, as well as when we came together to agree on certain ideas. I think some of our blogs should be this way, where we all have one page and we comment to each other. I know that we do this on the phone, but without eye contact it's easy just to not say anything.
Another cool idea that was brought up with the article had to do with identifying writing as "academic" vs. "personal essays and reviews of books". We do a lot of the latter probably because we are an "oral" bunch. Now I'm thinking to teach my grade 4 students to credit where they get info (either off the web or from books) when they do their animal reports in several weeks or so to do more of an "academic" paper...hmmm.