School Systems and Silicon Valley - Why the Extreme Differences in Workforces?- Audrey Watters

This presentation was most certainly an eye opener for me. The idea that women online were much more likely to be harassed and abused, even academic professionals, was something I had never considered or really thought about. When Alec pointed out he had never been victim to the type of Twitter abuse that Audrey experiences it really got me thinking about how the social media medium just became an easy conduit for sexism to keep rearing it's ugly head. I've always known about the racists, trolls and other such people that live to harass and be racist online. Even last week I was shocked at the tweet from the New England Patriot's Official Twitter account, with over 1 million Twitter followers. Take a look:



This tweet was sent out to 1 million plus followers.

The tweet was quickly deleted and the Patriots and they apologized for their software, which auto generated the tweet with the 1 millionth follower. Trolled.

Silicon Valley and School Systems

While I resonated with much of what Audrey had to say, I was critical of using the hiring practices of major corporation such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and so forth. Many of the companies had in the 70-80% range of male employees. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at U.S. PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11 (Retrieved from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing). The hiring is simply based on the available workforce. However Alec was quick to point out that this was just further indication of an issue in technology sector, and society and culture as a whole.


I also instantly thought of our school systems.

The male proportion of the full time educator workforce nationally dropped by 41% in 1989 to 35% in 1999, and is lower among younger educators. However, over longer time frames, the percentage of men in teaching has gone both up and down; women were a higher percentage of educators much earlier in the century. And there is continuing concern about the ability of women to play leadership roles in teacher education (Acker, 1997) and in the profession (Gaskell & Mullen, 2006). (Retrieved from http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ite/UserFiles/File/CharacterizingITE.pdf)

 

One thing that is noteworthy when it comes to systemic sexism is that both sectors have a disproportionate amount of men in higher positions relative to that of their workforce.

I need your help ECI. I have some thoughts but I want to open it up to you first!

Why is it that so few women enter computer science programs?

Why is it that so few men enter the education field?

QR Codes in the Classroom!

Depending on the technology deployment in your school, QR codes can be a valuable teaching tool. QR codes is short for Quick Response Code. They are essentially a graphic representation that cameras on devices can read and take you to different websites or guide you through various activities on your device. Read more about QR codes here.

Example of a QR Code. This one takes you to my classroom blog.

Our school division rolled out new Lenovo tablets this year that are app based and thus we are able to take advantage of QR codes.

Each school has a minimum of 32 tablets

QR codes are a great way to get students to selected websites very quickly. This is especially useful in the primary grades, when getting each student to a particular site might be very time consuming.

With our setup the each tablet has an app named QR Droid that allows students to read QR codes and get to any website in a click of the camera.

Students in my classroom using QR codes to get to 3 websites for inquiry based learning
 

Making and printing the QR codes only takes seconds. An easy to use QR code generator is found at http://goqr.me/. It can make any type of QR code and is free and easy to use.

We have also started having the students make their own QR codes to link to their online content. For our business expo where each student will be setting up a booth and selling a product, they were required to make an online radio commercial add using a great online voice recorder (which hosts for free) at http://vocaroo.com/. Then the students have to generate a QR code and place it on their business signage. When we are evaluating the students at our expo, the teachers will be using our devices to scan and listen to their radio ads.

Just a couple ideas about how we are using our new technology at school. Please feel free to add any uses you can think of or that you have used with this QR code technology!

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

November Cleanup- Triple Facepalm.

Last week's session proved to be very enlightening. Although Katia and Alec and the rest of you fine ECI 831 folks very kindly mentioned what you liked about my blogs so far, I really appreciated the constructive criticism when it came to the image copyrights and my two blogs being separated and not easy connected to each other.

When Katia, Alec, and ECI 831 first looked at my blogs this is the scene that I imagined in my head:

Katia eyes wide open in shock while Alec and other ECI members respond to my total disregard to Copyright.
Photo Credit: akulawolf via Compfight cc



 

So I decided I needed to pick up my socks and clean up what I'm presenting online. Firstly, I chose a more suitable and eye catching template for my pages. I then created links to each part of my blog and sat down and watched Alec's youtube video on blogging to help better figure out this citation of photo issue so I could avoid "copyright jail".

 

I wish my arrogance hadn't stopped me from watching the video before. I thought I was pretty much set when it came to blogging, but yet lacked some of the basic knowledge. If you haven't, I highly recommend!

 

After learning how to properly cite photos with Compfight I went back and changed some of the pictures that I found suitable replacements for. While I find the selection much more limiting, it is nice to know that I'm following the correct internet protocol and respecting other people's work.

 

Finally I updated my Twitter account and cleaned that up a bit to. All in all it was nice to get back on track and do a "winter cleaning".

 

I'm looking forward to getting back to blogging about my final project now that's finally completed and I have received my certificate from Duke!