C4T 2 Summary Post

Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mauthausen from Wesley Fryer on Vimeo.

I was assigned to comment on the blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wes Fryer. You can follow him on @wfryer.

The first post I commented on was Teacher Blog Controversity in Pennsylvania Points to Need for Social Media Guidelines. In his post, Mr. Fryer talks about a teacher in Pennsylvania who had a blog that she used to describe her disdain for some of her students. Some of her students and parents found her blog and brought it to the attention of the school's administration. She used foul language and was not very nice in describing some of her students. The teachers blog post's that are under scrutiny have been taken down from her blog, but since the "scandal", as she describes it, occured she has posted several other things. In her first post's since her blog was discovered she describes how she feels her blog should have been private. In our class we are being taught how to provide a digital footprint that we can be proud of. This teacher seems to have no remorse for creating a deplorable digital footprint. I hope she is never allowed to set foot in a classroom again.

I commented to Mr. Fryer that the Mobile County Public School System has recently began looking into to new social media guidelines. I feel that teachers like this one will make it easy for the powers that be to ban teachers from being able to use blogs and other social media. It is my hope that this one teacher and the few across the country that don't post the way they should don't take the useful tools of the internet out of our hands.

In the second post I commented on, Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mathausen, Mr. Fryer posted a video of a lecture given by a holocaust survivor and a concentration camp liberator. I watched the 90 minute long video and was moved by the message of the Mrs. Eva Hance and Mr. Mark Geeslin. Mrs. Hance gave a moving speech about her horrible experiences in Dachau and how they have taught her that hate is never the answer. Mr Geeslin told stories of how he felt when he liberated Mathausen Concentrartion Camp. His regiment actually found Mrs. Hances father alive atop a pile of dead bodies upon entering the camp.

I thanked Mr. Fryer for posting this video so that all could see. I feel that it is important for our young people to hear these first hand accounts. History has always just been written words that could be lost very easily. Now with things like this being put into the digital world first hand accounts can be saved forever. There are some people, like Irans Ahmadinejad, in this world that still say the holocaust never happened. If you watch the emotion with which Mrs. Hance tells her tale you could never believe such a thing as false.