Thoughts and questions of the old west

Before I watched the video on the old west in class I thought it was more about cowboys, bank robberies, and train jacking. The cowboys I thought about were Billy The Kid, Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill. I thought their were a lot of bank robberies because of Hollywood’s movies about the old west. The train jacking I thought about a lot was the ones that the banditos rode up on horseback and took the train over and then took all the money and threw all the people off.

My ideas of the old west weren’t as accurate as what I thought they were going to be. The three reasons that held me back from this was that there was Indians already in the west that I never even thought about, the land in the west was supposed to be farmed, and the movies set the Indians out to be the bad guys and the whites were always the victims. I never really thought about the Indians because I never thought about the Indians living in the west . I didn’t think of the land being farmed because I thought it was boring for the west because I thought of all the gun fights and everything of that nature. The whites were always set out to be the victims and that wasn’t true to be perfectly honest because they were taking the Indians land that they practically gave to the whites and how do they repay the Indians by giving them small pox victims blankets and getting dogs to ripe them apart.

The events that were mentioned in the movie that I thought was very strange was the Alamo and the custard war. Mexico was forced to fight for there land at the Alamo. We met them on Mexican land and we invaded them to take over the Alamo. Then Texas legalized slavery afterwards so it didn’t help the cause. The Custard war was mentioned and I thought it was a very interesting battle. The custard war was fought against the Indians and then custard failed to take the land from the Indians. The Indians then were always protected in their land.

This video did make me doubt some other things that I have learned in the past years because I never thought of the west as farming and gun fighting as dirty as it was . The gun fighting  was so dirty back then the movies showed that at high noon the men would meet and shoot but gun fighting back then it was getting shot in the back and so on and so forth.

 

Student Blogging Challenge September 2013

This year I am hoping to get more of my students to participate on a global scale when it comes to collaboration.  They were encouraged to participate in the Edublogs Student Blogging Challenge for enrichment points this fall.  I have a number of students who were interested in signing up for the challenge.  Since this specific blogging challenge does not really fall within my social studies curriculum I am making participation voluntary for the students.  They can do as many or as few assignments as they have time for and are comfortable with.

I am using Edmodo as my online classroom platform, with a group set up specifically for Enrichment Assignments.  Each challenge will be rolled out as an optional assignment with in the group.  Each week will also have an optional assignment to go out and comment on another students’ blog from the list of participants. The hope is that once students get into the habit of commenting and communicating with others we can expand naturally into collaboration.  A list of student participants can be found  here.

I will list and link my students’ blogs to a separate page as they begin their journey into global collaboration.  I am hoping that the activities give them confidence and interest to become active and responsible digital citizens.

What I Want To Learn About this Year.

I am Robby L. and I would like to say that I would like to learn more about the cold war. i would also like to learn how to use the iPods more effectively. The finale thing I would like to learn about is how to use edublogs and gaggle more.

I would like to know about the cold war because it was a very crucial time for the world. I think it would be interesting if i learned more about the cold war because it does interest me.

I would like to learn how to use the iPods more effectively because its very crucial for my work that i have to put up on edmodo when i don’t have a computer that i work with.

I would like to learn how to use edublogs and gaggle more because it is also crucial for my school work. I also need to update this blog for a big part of my grade and that is why i want to learn more about edublogs and gaggle.

These are the things that i expect to learn and hope to learn more about.