C4T Post: March

March 20:

My teacher for this post is Ms. Beth Knittle. Her blog is called "Beth's Thoughts on Technology in the Classroom", and she focuses on  Education, Technology, and Learning. The specific post for this week is called, "Happy Birthday Copernicus". I loved this post! She says that she noticed Google's doodle the other day was of Copernicus for what would have been his 540th birthday. She explained who he was and how he challenged the "Earth-centered" universe and introduced the "Sun-centered" universe. He is known for giving us the modern astronomy that we know today. In response to his challenging the norm, she says, "In Science, nothing is ever really settled." I love it! Math, just like Science, is never full figured out and that is what makes it so much fun and full of adventure. Shen then explains the process of scholars thinking the atom was the smallest piece of matter then finding out about the electrons, neutrons, and protons and thinking they were the smallest. But then again, they discovered Quarks. We learn more and more every day and over time, we are able to make wondrous discoveries! Never stop challenging the norm; Discover something!

April 1:

I have Ms. Beth Knittle's blog again. Her post is from March 30th and is titled "Losing Focus".  In this post, she writes about not being able to focus on anything long enough to get through her "process" of writing. This process is to read, think, read, converse, think, then write. She left a link to an article called "Is Google making us Stupid?" So, being the over achiever that I am, I read it too. This article was written by Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic in July of 2008. I can't begin to summarize all that this article offers as far as ideas about what the internet does to our brains. Just an overview, then I suggest that you read it yourself, would be that as you used the web to click between different pages and links and skip around from idea to idea, which the web makes so easy and convient, we start to think like that too. We have fast, short, shallow thoughts instead of diving deep into single thoughts and staying there and taking them in. It was a good read, but long. Can you finish it? Or is one article for that length of time just too "deep" for one thought? Will you be able to concentrate long enough to finish it..... I couldn't. I urge you to try.