I started off my summer by going on a five-day road trip through Wyoming and North and South Dakota with my Dad.  My Dad and I have been talking about taking a trip together for some time now but between my school schedule and his work commitments it has been a challenge to find a week that we could both get away. Both of us went on this trip so that we could, essentially, turn our brains off, relax, and sightsee but, instead, we ended up learning a lot along the way.  The tourist attractions are rich with history, full of beauty, and they teach about western and First Nations culture, equally.  For example, at Devil's Tower National Monument, a gigantic rock formation in Wyoming, you can read the scientific explanation and the Indigenous explanations of how it formed.  I would love to take my future students on a field trip to these states because I feel their artifacts do a very good job of informing people about different ways of knowing, including those of the Sioux, and Lakota.  Some of my favourite points of interest were: Devil's Tower, Needles Highway, Deadwood, and the Crazy Horse Memorial site, which is home of The Indian Museum of North America.  

Here is a map of the route we took, which I would highly recommend, as well as a few pictures I took along the way :)

This week I read an article entitled Why Twitter and Facebook Are Not Good Instructional Tools by an English and digital media teacher named Paul Barnwell.  In his article, Barnwell discusses how students do not use certain social networking sites, such as Twitter, to their full potential but, rather, they use them as a distraction from their school-work.  Barnwell also argues that certain web services, like Poll Everywhere and Prezi, do not offer any educational value because they allow students to use gimmicks, such as colourful graphics and fragmented text, to convey their ideas, and their novelty only lasts for a short amount of time.