Monitoring Student Performance Online- Helpful or Invasive?

A recent article from the New York Times discussed many new programs that schools all over the country have been using. These programs are designed to provide a complete, updated record of students' grades and attendance to those who find the information valuable, i.e. students wanting to know how they stand and parents wanting to find out that which their kids would not have told them otherwise. Since the creation of these programs, there has been great debate over whether or not this is disrespectful of students' privacy or a helpful tool for involved parents to use.

I personally believe that these programs are completely invasive and provide parents with information that they don't need to know that frequently. They result in additional chaos within families today, as bad grades have now become an even bigger problem in the eyes of concerned parents. According to the article, "On Facebook, in typical Internet shorthand, a teenager writes: 'I walk into my house and I don’t even get a ‘hello son, howd your day go?’ I get yelled at bcuz I failed a test.'"

I also think that this idea of constant and complete access to grades puts far too much emphasis on simply getting a good grade. Without the true motivation from the school system to learn and apply the material that is taught, actuall intelligence is rapidly declining, while cheating has occurred much more frequently. "Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer who consults with secondary schools, worries that these programs can aggravate student anxiety. 'When the focus is on the grade so much, you’re saying to kids, ‘It’s more important to get the grade, by hook or by crook, than learn the material,’' she said. 'And that leads to the rise in rampant cheating.'"

Overall, I stand by my opinion that these invasive new programs are just one example of how technology can have significant negative effects upon our daily lives, and I believe that no good can possibly come from this unnecessarily anxiety-raising system. Student privacy should be acknowledged, and parents should learn to cope with the standard report card system that by no means should be replaced.

Great and Evil Leaders in History

GREAT!
Martin Luther King, Jr.
George Washington
John F. Kennedy
Julius Caesar
Abraham Lincoln

I chose these people because they all did great things for society. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave colored people a voice when they needed it most, particularly with his famous "I Have A Dream!" Speech. George Wahsington was one of the founding fathers of the USA and helped us win in the Revolutionary War. John F. Kennedy brought a great deal of charisma to the position of US President, and everyone all over the country loved him at the time. Julius Caesar stabilized Italy during the peak of Roman culture and led great achievements in many fields. Abraham Lincoln also was a great leader in helping the North win the Civil War.
EVIL!
Adolf Hitler
Fidel Castro
Qin Shi Huangdi
Richard Nixon
George W. Bush

In my eyes, the above five have all brought immense shame to themselves and their nations. Adolf Hitler, of course, was responsible for the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews, among many others. Fidel Castro was the cruel dictator of Cuba for far too many years. Qin Shi Huangdi lived long ago during the Qin dynasty in China, but he was a ruthless ruler, working his subjects to the bone. Richard Nixon took part in the Watergate Scandal, stealing large sums of money from the U.S. government. Finally, President George W. Bush went into Iraq with nothing but misinformation and completely destabilized the government there, killing many civilians and soldiers in the process.

Keeping Yahoo! from Becoming Old News...

In a recent New York Times article, it discussed a recent speech by Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo!, in which he said that, unfortunately, Yahoo! has not yet obtained the new look everyone's looking for. Over the years, Yahoo! has become a complex network that an extremely large number of people use to communicate to one another, with new features such as Yahoo! groups, certain developers' programs, and others, but of course, its very popular search engine is still up and running.

Yahoo! now is starting to develop a plan with which it intends to beat out many of its biggest competitors, namely Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It wants to reach out all over the Web to outside applications and other sites, to gain more internet traffic. "'The goal,' Mr. Yang said, 'is to turn Yahoo into a primary online “starting point” for consumers.'" As Yahoo! gradually begins to seem like it is likely to start losing popularity, and consumers, investers start to question whether or not their investments truly are a good idea. Yahoo! is still the most popular property on the Web, but certain sites, like Google, beat out Yahoo! in number of searches performed by a long shot. Google has even developed a counter to MyYahoo!, known as iGoogle, allowing viewers to personalize their homepages and, of course, boosting popularity. Many of the people who work at Yahoo! say that they should still offer basic features, like search, email, and instant messaging, yet people like Liz Lufkin have organized new features, like the "today module", which displays new information that coincides with recent trends in searches and other hot topics on the Web. An important aspect of this is its outreach to third party websites, which many consider problematic, while many say it could help boost popularity. Overall, many new features in the future of Yahoo! are promising, yet will they help?

Personally, I believe these new changes are essential to the development of such a website. Its outreach to other sites will definitely boost its popularity, as Yahoo! will be affiliated with more sites and will hence be visited more often. I believe its new features will also make it more popular in our world of speed-communication, and its search engine will simply prove another additional asset to its ranking in cyber-popularity. In general, I believe Yahoo! has a bright future, yet it must be quick to make these very important changes for its own benefit, and that of its consumers and investers.

Creativity

Do you ever find that you are most creative in a certain environment? Sometimes I realize that I write my best work when I am inspired by some sort of recent event, particularly a tragedy. For example, for my English class, we were given an assignment to do one of various things to write a two-page entry in our journals, but for mine, a great deal of ideas ran through my head. When given a book to write in freely, such as my English journal, although I don't use it very often, I find that my best work reveals itself when I am prompted by some sort of motive or initiative, particularly about something that has had a major impact on my life. I believe I write best at night, where everything is most calm and quiet, making it easier for me to think. Sometimes I like to listen to music while I do my work as well, to further inspire me and put me in a more relaxing environment. Everyone has different circumstances under which they are most creative, but the above are some of mine that help me do my best work of which I am most proud.

Aha! Moments...

During 2007, I'm sure there were a great deal of us that went through frustrating times, whether they were serious problems or minor issues. Overall though, I found that I was able to overcome any problems I had, usually by simply being optimistic. For example, I'll confess that I did procrastinate several times on major assignments for school, and that I ended up staying up late. Being a relatively good student, I didn't want my work to suffer from these time constraints, but I was getting worried that I wouldn't be able to achieve what I wanted on these projects. Although I was almost in panic, I constantly told myself to think positively and focus on what I needed to do, and when I got my grade back, I had received perfect scores on both assignments. Another time when a frustrating situation seemed to suddenly fall into place was when I was working on my HTML-encoded webpages for my Webpage Design class. A good amount of the time, there were minor errors in the codes which made major problems in the webpage, but I worked hard to find them, fixed them appropriately, and everything worked out fine. There is no feeling like when you know you've done a good job on something you worked hard on, so these so-called "aha!" moments always make my day. I know to always focus whenever I have a difficult task ahead of me, so that I know no problems shall arise. I hope you all had a great 2007, as well as a happy holiday season. Happy 2008!

Just Your Basic HTML Tutorial...

This video, on basic HTML encoding for a rather simple webpage, gives step-by-step instructions on how to create your basic online webpage, including a title, body, and bold and italic font. It goes through the basic tags, such as <html>, <head>, <title>, <body>, <p>, <strong>or <b>, and <em>, the latter two of which create bold and italic font, respectively. It also addresses the fact that, at some point, all tags must be closed with a repeat command with a forward slash (/) before the word. From the comments below the video and from my own reaction, I can determine that this video has helped many to format their HTML-encoded webpages and that tutorials like this have been very beneficial for a great number. Personally, I learned one or two codes I had never known before, so in general, I found this tutorial a great idea and very helpful for me as well.

25 Days... Can you Make a Difference

Laura, a 10-year old girl from New York, has recently created a blog titled "25 Days to Make a Difference", where she has told of her plans to do little things to help those around her for the first 25 days of December, as well as what she has done on each day so far. At this point, she has performed many small but meaningful deeds for many people and even animals, such as cleaning her fishbowl, donating spare change to the Salvation Army, and writing a message to her school's lunch monitors thanking them for all of their hard work. Her original goal was to encourage some people to try to better the holiday season for a few others, and give a $25 donation to the one who donated the most. She was completely astounded when she discovered the huge amount of people that actually committed to making a difference. When I read this, I felt really good, knowing that people can use technology to help others and make many people feel better. I believe sites like this can really encourage people to get involved in their communities and really help to make the lives of many much better. People like us can take her advice by simply doing small things like helping out around the house, taking the time to thank somebody for their hard work which would normally go unnoticed, and possibly even creating our own blogs about helping others on any scale. Personally, I'm planning on asking my parents what I can do to help them around the house, as I've seen that they have a ton of work to do for their jobs lately, in addition to caring for my siblings and me. Also, I've received a good amount of money from Chanukah presents, and, after reading Laura's blog, I'm definitely planning on donating that to charity, possibly to the AIDS Relief Fundraiser currently going on in our high school. For a class project, we could possibly contact a local charity and create a site where people could donate money or sign up to help out there, to really help those in need. Overall, I believe Laura's site was a fantastic idea, and she's really helping out as much as she can. It's good to know there are people like her out there, those who sometimes don't get the recognition they deserve. In the future, we should all try to change that.