Technology Survey

Reflections On Digital Life

Facebook Follies

    This documentary was really interesting and I loved watching it. There were some very interesting stories about what happened to some people all because of Facebook. One that was really shocking to me was that there was this teenage girl having a birthday and invited people to it via a Facebook page. But, she forgot to edit the privacy settings and ended up having a ton of strangers showing up at her house. Even though people didn't know the girl, they still went and some got detained or even arrested. I never realized that things like this can happen to people for making a mistake on Facebook. There was also another really shocking story in the documentary that involved a robbery. The man who robbed this family's house decided to steal the young boy's laptop where Facebook was logged in,when he logged out and singed into his own. This would already give the police enough hints at who stole their property, but the robber made the mistake of posting a picture of him holding some stolen money,and was soon caught by police. I found it really interesting because no one really understood why the robber did this but it made the officers' jobs a lot easier.

Digital Life Quiz

    The quiz we did on digital life was really interesting because we got to see different statistics that happened to be extremely shocking. The most shocking one to me though, was a question that asked, "What percentage of teens age 15 to 18 believe their friends share too much information online?" and I never would have guessed the answer to be 80%. I have never really thought or cared about what my friends post online and if they feel like doing it than it's up to them. So, it was really shocking to me that 80% of teenagers think this of their friends and what they post online. The statistic that is actually something I do, is that I sleep with my cell phone on or near my bed every night. It made a lot of sense to me that four out of five teens do this as well because at this point it almost feels like an instinct! Another one that I never would have guessed was, "One-third of kids ages 12 to 17 send more than _______ texts each day." and the answer was 100! I barely text at all unless I'm having an important conversation with someone. Even then I would rather be on the phone, and I usually do end up talking on the phone with them. Digital media I use the most is probably my laptop because I prefer it over my cell phone and it's just easier to use and navigate with. The one I use the least is probably my TV because I only ever have it on at night and still, I don't ever use it.

The Digital World

     The video about the digital world was interesting because it showed a lot about the upsides and downsides of having access to so much personal information. An upside I experience on a regular basis is being able to keep in touch with friends and family quickly and easily. I think that the ability to message through Facebook and texting is a much more efficient way to communicate with people long distance because even if they aren't looking at their phone they get your notification and the response is back within seconds. The downsides to living in a world with so much digital media is that when posting anything online, you have to be so cautious about who might see it and what people can interpret it as whether it be a picture or a status. I think that social media websites should have better security systems because it's possible to find just about anyone's personal information though Google and Facebook. I don't think that people should be able to view and share peoples pictures and statuses without having them added as a friend or without their permission because a lot less problems involving privacy invasion would happen. For the most part, pretty much everyone uses digital media to connect with others because of how beneficial it is. In the future, I can't imagine that digital and social media will cause people to lose contact with others because people will always have face to face conversation no matter what technology surfaces.

Digital Dummies

      The documentary, "Are We Digital Dummies?" was really shocking and interesting to watch. It included a lot of examples of how you might be out of control of your technology, even when it seemed normal to us. Forgetting a password for a site is included in being out of control and that is a very common thing that happens to everyone! This documentary had a lot of very interesting experiments done and one of them was conducted at a university and involved a man dressed up as a clown riding a unicycle. He rode around the campus and 25% the teens that were using cellphones at this time were questioned and said they saw nothing unusual that morning. This brought rise to the fact that if this happened while they were driving and the clown was replaced with an animal or a person it would be extremely dangerous. Something that this documentary discussed was something I had already heard about, but still was interesting to hear other people's opinions, and that was on the book, "The Dumbest Generation" by Mark Bauerlein. I honestly think that the man who wrote this book needs to be advised that he has no clear knowledge about us and no justifiable opinion on our generation. He is merely an author of a book that got popular because adults with teenage kids agreed with him because they thought they're family needed some sort of change. Our generation has been put down for so long because we have advanced technologically and thought we would take the time to enjoy what we have, but adults see it as us being lazy. Out generation isn't lazy. In fact, we hold the record for the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize, awarded to a 17 year old girl. We are the ones who will accomplish more than the adults who took the time to read and agree with this book full of uneducated opinions by a fully grown adult on a young generation of teenagers who won't settle for being put down any more. 

The Dark Web

       This documentary was about tracking systems hidden in websites and how personal information can be stolen or misinterpreted. Many of the companies mentioned in this documentary run websites that have hidden trackers and use what is called a serial number to track and sell your personal information on another website or in an advertisement. In my opinion, I don't think that people should be able to track the websites you visit or who you email because it's invading privacy and just because it's "on the internet to be seen by everyone" doesn't make it justified, because a lot of people don't understand the tracking system and are tricked into it. Just because someone has personal information on their blog or on Facebook, shouldn't make them more vulnerable to having their privacy demolished then someone would be if they had just said it out loud to their friend. Facebook makes everything seem great and secure on their site but really, most information that people search for on Facebook can be found in seconds, no matter what privacy settings you have turned on for your account. But, the most interesting part of this entire documentary was that a website called "Silk Road" was being used to sell massive quantities of narcotics to people anonymously, and they actually went about their way not getting caught for quite a long time! I think what allowed them to stay hidden for so long was the title of their site. "Silk Road" obviously seems to have no connection to drug paraphernalia, so people who didn't know about it probably never even searched for it by that title. 

Technology Presentation

       In one of our recent classes, we had someone come in and do a presentation on technology for our BBT class. I really enjoyed the presentation because it was really informative about how we use technology and how often we use it. It was really surprising that kids in grade 2 and 3 are using the social media and playing the video games that we do in highschool because a lot of those sites and games have a lot of graphic content or profanity that young kids really shouldn't be a part of. I think that them using the things we do branched off of them either having an older brother of sister who used it on their phone and talked about it all the time, causing curiosity in the younger kid and then eventually leading them to use them to be like their sibling. Something that we've heard probably a million times before but still need to acknowledge that was included in the presentation is about Snapchat. When we use Snapchat we assume that when the person we send it to opens it, it's gone and deleted forever. But, nothing on the internet or our phones is ever deleted permanently and there is always some sort of way to retrieve it again by either yourself, or someone taking your information. Over all though, I really liked this presentation and it was very entertaining!

Privacy On The Internet

       I think that the graphic novel did a really good job at explaining how personal information you put on the internet can be seen by anyone even with privacy settings. The two main characters in the novel were shocked that when they met so many new people, all of them already knew a lot about them through their social media posts because their cousin told her friends they were visiting. I think it's really important to have strong passwords for your phone and websites because if it's something like '1234' like used in the story, it's usually the first thing anyone tries when they have someones phone or their Facebook email address. I think that the scariest part of having your personal information known by anyone from online is that they could easily find out where you live by either location connected posts or the school you have listed. It's one of the easiest things to find because pretty much every university or school has some sort of website that has it's phone number and address.

Everyday Privacy

        This article confirmed the fact that when you use a credit card at any store, your information is kept, and that when you order clothing, books or anything from any online store that company's website saves what you're interested in and gives you suggestions depending what you bought or viewed before. It also confirmed that cellphone calls can be recorded and played by anyone to listen to, and that downloading an app to your phone can get all sorts of information from you. They can note information like credit card information, your email address your location and the contacts in your address book saved in your phone. From gathering information like this, companies that create these apps know what other apps you would like, and give you recommendations tailored through that information.

Cyberbullying

    

     Cyberbullying is often between two people, the target and the offender. The target is the victim to the offender's actions and the offender is the one harassing the target online. This kind of bullying can escalate in so many ways and so fast it's usually unexpected. Some of the ways that it can escalate is if the offender gets their friends involved to harass the target as a group or if a photo or something the target said or of them is posted publicly. If something about the target does happen to get posted, it can turn their friends against them because it can make them look like a bad person. I think that it is really important to be an upstander to any kind of bullying because you never know how it can end up and it's better to stop it as early on as possible. But, I do believe that if you are standing up for yourself it's a whole different story. If someone treated you badly and you confront them about it, that's okay. Also, it's always a good idea to eliminate people or friends from your life that don't make you happy or make you feel good about yourself. If they are constantly putting you down for absolutely no reason, it's always acceptable to leave them, and if they're offended that's their problem and they should have realized it was bound to happen eventually.  Ways that upstanders can deescalate a cyberbullying situation like this is if you ignore or block the offender online. If they feel that it has no impact on you and you just don't care, they tend to give up. You can also tell adults and other people you trust, save the evidence of things they said for later documentation and change your privacy settings!

Journal Entry Five

For this project we created a game using Sploder and the class shared them on their blogs so we could play and mark each other's games. This was my favorite project we've done so far in this course because it was really fun to create something that looks so similar to the kind of things we grew up with by using an easy program online. I also really liked playing other student's games to see how they would use the given essentials to benefit their projects and make an entertaining game for the class to enjoy and try to win. The easiest part of creating a game using Sploder was that everything was given to you and all you had to do was drag and drop items on to the grid and it would create the world for you. Although creating a real video game is nothing like what we did for this project, it was far less time consuming and a lot more fun because the class got to see so many different games made by their peers! For the most part, I don't play a lot of video games but when I do, it's almost always on a game console because I find them a lot easier to navigate with than a computer or cell phone game. Also, i'm not very good at any games except for a few that are fairly simple, like any Mario game. I can never play games that have controls for your character and the camera separate on the controller because it should just have one that moves the character and it processes where you want to face or what direction you want to move in. The only game I ever played to the end with controls like that was "Heavy Rain" and depending on how you played the game you got a different ending, and I somehow managed to get the worst possible one. So, that kind of proves how horrible I am at most games. But it was one of my favorite games because I did finish it and would like to see if I could get a better ending then what I did the first time!

Sploder Game

Make a Free Flash Game

Journal Entry Four

For this project, we had to create a slideshow presentation using Google Slides on a video we used for a previous assignment. The video had to be of a recent technological advancement that we found interesting, and we had to incorporate the main idea and key points of the video into our slideshow.

The video I chose was about a new invention called the "Soft Exosuit" that was created by scientists Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. It's purpose is to increase the wearer's strength and endurance, and to protect them from injury and physical stress while doing so. Many exoskeletons have been invented in the past, but Harvard's version is more lightweight, comfortable, and has easier mobility than any before it. 

I chose this video because it's really interesting that this invention has the ability to help people with spinal-cord injuries recover and even walk. I think this invention is going to be a major advancement in health benefiting technology and hopefully the Soft Exosuit will be used to help people with physical disability's a lot more in the future. 

Using Google Slides was pretty straight-forward and it took no time to create a slideshow. I really enjoyed using this program because it's easy to share the slideshow and embed it onto Blogger. Creating a slideshow this way was more effective and easy in my opinion, and work got done a lot faster. 

For the most part, this project was fun because we got to look into new technology that we found interesting and it was a lot more enjoyable because we got to choose what our presentation was on. I hope that we get more chances to use this program rather than another to make a presentation because it was a lot easier to use and work with. 

Journal Entry Three

For our most recent project, we worked in groups to take pictures on a topic of our choice and used the camera techniques we learned previously to benefit our pictures. 

Working on this project was fairly easy, but it took our class longer than expected to finish our photo stories. We hit obstacles with weather that we couldn't control, but in the end, everyone got done and had amazing results with their slideshows. No one had any other big issues and the most time consuming part of the project was taking the pictures! 

To create our slideshow, we had to use iMovie and it was very confusing when we first started out because no one in our group had experience with it before. After getting used to how it worked, it was pretty simple and our group finished with it at a good time. Working in a group for this project was okay, but I think it would have been easier to be working alone. A lot of the groups worked extremely well together and ours did as well but we only finished on the last day. So, if we were alone, we would probably have been done sooner. 

Before doing this project, photography seemed a lot more difficult, but now that we know all the different camera techniques, it makes it so much easier! I really liked doing this project because it was really fun, and it showed us that taking pictures can have many obstacles, and isn't as easy as some people make it out to be. Overall, this project was my favorite one we've done in this class and I loved seeing other people's photo stories.

Google Presentation