Online Rubric aka Artifact 1

Winter Holiday in Japan (Fake student entry)

The assignment was to find a big cultural event in Japan and compare it to the American counterpart and I choose New years.

While both America and Japan are common in their way of the young people getting together for parties, when you see the specific foods that say bring luck, and even going to a temple to pray to the gods may seem a little exotic to some people. I found an interesting site that talked about the specific food they eat and specific traditions!

The sight is Japan-guide.com. It tells not only about the traditions on the day after but also what they usually do the next day also. Most Americans are just nursing hang overs, haha.

"Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education"

I'm happy I stumbled across this particular video because they discuss exactly what I'm interested in doing.

This video pretty much discusses how teaching overseas really prepares you the best for any sort of education. And how through dealing with things like Culture Shock and convergence you can learn how to become a better teacher.

The main point that seemed to be made by all the arguements is that a teacher needs to be flexible. A teacher should be prepared to change or offer up new information at anytime.

It was fascinating too because they also showed the benefit of international schools in this video, and how it certainly expands one's horizons.

QUIZLET!

The name of the site, if you could not tell my the exclamatory statement, is Quizlet.

This site is a personal favorite of mine.

It appears to be sponsored by a company called Happy Studies!

The purpose of the website is to be a study tool. It offers games and flashcard printouts and just frankly is a lot easier and more fun way to study.

Another great thing about the site, is from what I looked through is there is no advertising.

This could be relevant to any education major because it offers a variety of subjects to study from. All a person has to do is click on the genre of there class and half the time you'll find several flash cards and games for them to use. This is great to give to your students because it saves them a lot of hassle of making flash cards themselves and gives them a fun way to study. And if a person feels particularly nice they can even upload material themselves to help others.

If you could not tell, I absolutely adore this site, and would recommend it to any student that wants a good study tool.

Open Culture Site

The name of the website is Open Culture: The Best Free cultural and educational media on the net.

Sort of ironically, we had actually looked at this site in one of the assignments for my computers in education class, but moving on.

Based on the copyright on the bottom one can assume that Open Culture is a company that sponsors it's own site, not any real sponsors that I can see. You can even follow it on Twitter and Facebook.

The site pretty much offers free services such as audio books, online courses, movies, language lessons, etc etc. It also has a news feed that seems to deal with teaching in general to technology blogging. Great variety of things to take in on this site.

What's particularly nice about this site is it's advertising anything it is the fact that the tools they offer are free. The few advertising there is there is usually only one per article or page that you visit.

The site is pleasing to the eye, nothing clashing really color wise and is easy to manuever.

I would most likely, as an educator, use the language lessons part of the site the most. For almost every language they have several links to help people learn the language and, considering the fact I most likely want to teach a second language, this would be really helpful for students who need that extra studying tool.

Link: http://www.openculture.com/