IM, Power Point & Blackboard

Today I had an interesting conversation with some 4th graders about their home literacies. I will focus on one particular student, let's call her Desirae. Desirae informed me that she uses the Internet everday to search the web (she likes one of the wrestling pages), email, IM and uses My Space. She was going to show me her My Space page but the AISD server wouldn't let us go there. I was really fascinated with all she knew how to do and the prevalence the on-line world has in her life. She said she uses the Internet everyday afterschool. She described to me her My Space page and how she has 298 friends on-line! She explained to me the process of creating a page and how she had to lie about her age to get a page. She said she claims she is 16 and goes to Austin High School. She also told me about going to another website (hotfreelayouts.com) to get images to go on her My Space page. When I asked her about the text on her page she told me comments are posted by other people and she has a section called "About Me." I asked her if she has a photo of herself and she said she does. When I asked her how she got the photo on there she told me all about scanning in the photo and saving it to the computer, etc. I really think it's fascinating just how "advanced" she is on the computer, considering she's only 11 and is a "struggling" reader and writer.

Desirae also informed me about IMing. She explained that she communicates with her cousins and other family members as well as friends. She talked about the different ways of representing text (much like the students in the Lewis & Fabos article) including an abbreviation for boy (bi). It was really fascinating to have read the article and then hear these students talk about the same things. In the case of Desirae, her mother taught her how to do most of the stuff. When I asked Desirae if she ever worried about strange people, she acknowledged the chance of encountering strange people but didn't seem too worried. She said her mother worried a little. She said she never tells any one where she lives, she just says "East Austin." (At least she knows not to give out her address)

As a person who does not have a My Space page and does not IM very often (except to my best friend in NYC), I was so intrigued by my students' on-line lives. What is scary, though, is that Desirae reffered to another teacher at my school as having a My Space page. If I ever thought about having a My Space page before, well I definitely don't want one now. That's too weird for me to think about my students checking out my page (unless I were to gear it towards that specifically). I just think there should be a line between private and school life.

Now on the topic of Power Point. Power Point is a program which I did not use until graduate school. As an undergrad, it was just becoming popular and I still had psychology classes with overheads and art history classes with traditional slide shows. In my design classes, we never used the program, instead we used programs like Flash and Director to accomplish much of the same thing (and more!). As a design student, we were snobs about Power Point, thinking it too beneath us to use--for much of the same reasons given in the Adams article having to do with limited design options or everything looking the same. When it came time to use Power Point in grad school, I didn't have any trouble learning because I was so familiar with much more difficult programs.

My experience with Power Point is that it is easy and convenient to use. I guess I like this about it. I don't have to think too hard when using it. It was interesting though to read Adams's article and the things she points about it creating a habit of mind. Now that I think about it, it really does drive a way of thinking about putting information in bullets.

My husband is also a student and he takes a lot of science classes. He is always downloading Power Point presentations from Blackboard and so I asked him what he thought about Power Point. Some of the things he said are:
1) It seems to reduce class attendance because people can get the notes on-line
2) It works well for visual images like graphs and diagrams
3) They are always required for class presentations
4) It makes studying for tests easier, especially when professors say they won't test over anything not covered on the slides

One more thing I would like to point out: Blackboard seems to have really changed the way college classes are conducted too. When I was an undergrad we didn't have Blackboard, but now it seems to be a part of every class. How has Blackboard changed your class experiences?