My google reader seems to stay way about 1000 items unread at all times. I do look at them every time i 
open my gmail but it seems to fill up constantly. One of the feeds that i do love though is “Teachers love smartboard. Just last week i was helping a special ed teacher make a smart notebook to use with one of his students to make change. Then along comes this feed with a link to CASH OUT and i just wanted to start screaming! There is was…..right there in front of me. An idea i could use. Then i saw the Build your Wild Self website and i was off to fantasy land to create my new AVATAR look. If i didn’t have my GOOGLE reader set up with these great links, i would never have found these new ideas. Since most of the schools i work in have smartboards, this will be a link that i can definitely share with my teachers.
I also love to read 2 cents worth. It is one of my favorite blogs and i find myself always checking it first to see where in the world David Warlick is!
TOday i even added a WORD OF THE DAY to my feeds. I decided if i am going to have to write these blogs, then i am going to learn some fancy words to include in my writing. I am still trying to figure out how to use ubiquitous!!!!
Last Friday, I felt like a child in a candy story. What fun!!!! I was oohing and ahhing and making notes and sendine emails to some of my teachers, knowing that they would love some of the online tools that we were looking at. I found 3 that i played with more than the others:
1) Mixbook – ever since i saw Chery’s daughters wedding photos in a book album i have been looking for a program that would make me a book of pictures. This one came just in time for CHristmas. Last summer i had scanned about 50 black and white pictures of my siblings from our childhood and was trying to find a way to share them in a fairly inexpensive way that wouldn’t necessarily be on a computer. This one was so much fun.
2) Dumpr - I loved putting pictures of my family in the art gallery for all to see.
3) TA DA List – Since i am taking my son to NYC for the Thanksgiving Holiday this gave me a chance to actually type up a list of things we want to do and then email it to my sister who lives up there so she will know what we are interested in seeing.
AS far as educational uses, i will have to put my brain to this later on, but i am sure that as i use these tools more often, i will think of ways to put them to use. I personally think i learn to use products better when they are personal for me.
WOW! It is amazing that this online conference has been going on for several years now and i am just finding out about it. Thank goodness it will still be online in archive format when i want to go back and look at more topics. This is a great resource for educators. I loved looking through the topics and picking out something that i thought would interest me. I watched a video by Wes Fryer from LEADING THE CHANGE KEYNOTE - The Voices of School 2.0: School Reform as described by the words and images of the people of the Science Leadership Academy. He brought out some great points about how education needs to be transformed.
1. Schools need to be caring institutions – we teach kids, not subjects
2. Schools need to be student centered – it is not about us, the teachers
3. Schools need to be inquiry driven
4. Schools need to be passionate and it has to matter – dare kids to change the world!
5. Schools need to teach metacognition – students need to be thinking about thinking – asking questions and reflecting
6. Schools need to move from recall based learning to understanding driven learning.
7. Schools need to manage technology as if it were oxygen – ubiquitous, necessary and invisible.
I am sure if i have time to watch more videos i will find other great ideas. This is such a unique way to present. Again it requires time to sit and watch these wonderful presentations.
I couldn’t really think of any image that i really wanted to use for a lesson, so i chose BOATS since they will take you away from the hectic pace of life to a relaxing, soothing setting that will help you forget all of the things you left behind. I am learning the process and hope this works when i hit publish. I choose the Rock You site because it had music added automatically and will try using the other slide shares also just to see how they work in comparison to this one. WOW! This is fun!
I had a very frustrating week trying to get FlickR to load from school and finally realized that it is being blocked. So at last, i decided i would have to do my work at home. FlickR is full of pictures and as with blogs and RSS feeds, you can get on picture overload. Unfortunately, i am one of those people who take pictures, puts them in an album and looks at them every once in a while. Or i send them to family members via email. I am not a creative photographer and don’t have an artistic bone in my body. So i had a hard time figuring out what theme or topic i even wanted to look for pictures about. I finally saw a picture of a boat and decided i would go with different styles of boats. I am a little scared about how how i am actually going to put this in a slide show later this week. Next time i take a lot of pictures with my digital camera i am going to try to load them to FlickR and use this website for storage. I will see how that works.
Before watching these videos, i had never even heard about Creative Commons. I know that during the past year, our county has been trying to emphasize the copyright laws to teachers and students during training in all of our Teach 21 classes. We are all guilty of using material that is not ours and i know that we think deep down that it is ok because we are not going public with our presentations. These videos were very informative and helped me to understand more about the creative commons copyright ideas. I have not seen any CC’s on any websites that i have visited, but i can honestly say i probably wasn’t really looking. I am sure i will be more aware of them from now on. I feel sure that copyright issues will definitely affect the way students learn and create projects. Many times students don’t even think about the copyright issues – they just use whatever resources they can download. We need to train them to use free music, clip art and videos.
I almost missed this one. Thank goodness i had gone back to read some of the other class members blogs and saw this 7A thing and realized that i had skipped it. Good timing though because last night i tried to catch up with my Google Reader and found some very interesting ideas. I started watching a video about using Games in Education. Sylvia Martinez was presenting at a conference and talked about the fact that kids love to play games and we want to engage kids to learn so why not use games. Her blog was GAMES AND EDUCATION. She worked for the company that created Math Blasters for over 8 years so her insight was so real. As i was going through the Reader feeds i was completely overwhelmed by all of the information that was in my box. I did try to read several of David Warlick’s blogs about a 3 Way Conversation where all participants had their flip cameras going at the same time to record everything they were saying. Can you imagine if we let students use these flip cameras to record their group discussion and collaboration. Theymight stay on task a lot longer!!!
I have really enjoyed looking at the wiki sites this week and keep seeing some great ideas for wiki uses. I was actually so inspired that i decided i would offer a WIKI class to my Teach 21 teachers next semester if i can find enough materials. One of the wiki’s i really enjoyed was Teacher First Wiki Walk Through. This site really helped me understand all of the components of a Wiki. Jennifer Davis’ blog about Wikis helped me think through the reality of how teachers might use a wiki in their classroom. Jennifer Dorman’s wiki Grazing For Digital Natives is chock full of great tools. Maybe a little overwhelming for those of us who are just starting to learn about wikis. School’s in the Past was more my speed. It was very simple, didn’t have a lot of add ons but had enough topics to engage students, parents and grandparents. Great start for a collaboration site. The Salute to Seuss reminded me of a project that one of my Teach 21 teachers did last year so it gave me another idea for a Teach 21 capstone. I like the way the left side bar is organized. It was very easy to navigate through this site. As of right now, i don’t have enough wiki experience to do any of them better but hopefully as i look at these examples i will
I am really trying to be open minded about the RSS feeds this time because i kinda of resisted adding them when i took Web 2.0 with Sandi. However, even now that i have added the required feeds i feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that is coming through these feeds. There is no way in all of creation to process or even try to keep up with all of this material. I am going to look at this as the training ground for my retirement days….when i will have nothing but time to read.
One article that did catch my attention though was the blog about Shopping for a Wiki Tool. I have been fascinated with WIKIS from the first time i saw one and i am so anxious to figure out how teachers can really use them for collaboration projects in the classroom. This blog helped me to understand more about the uses of wikis and i am looking forward to our week to learn more about wikis.
I have heard about blogging for several years now and have tried to create a blog once in another class, but really wasn’t sure how and why a teacher would use a blog. After looking at 5 specific blogs and actually reading most of all them, i am starting to get the picture. My favorite of the 5 blogs was Ben Wilkoff’s blog about The Ripe Environment. This one hit me exactly the way i feel about all of this new technology. Ok. We have it, but what do we do with it and how do we use it. I was so excited last year when i created a WIKI in another class i was taking and sent it to my family to participate in a family forum. I may have had 2 entries, out of the 8 siblings that i invited to participate. The same think happened with a blog that i set up. Maybe i am just targeting the wrong people or haven’t really figured out how to engage my audience. Hopefully as i work through the class, the end results may become clearer. It appears that people are reading other people’s blogs and commenting on them. It is addicting as many of you are finding out and you end up following the rabbit down many holes as you move from one topic to another. Who has the time?
The other blog that i really liked was called Teaching Brevity. Maybe if we can learn to use a few, concise, emphatic words, then it won’t take us so long to read all of these blogs. For those of you who LOVE to write, blogging would seem like an extension of yourself. Some people have a real gift for words. I can speak them plenty, but have a hard time making my words always so what i want them to say. But i am willing to try. Who knows, i may love it!
open my gmail but it seems to fill up constantly. One of the feeds that i do love though is “Teachers love smartboard. Just last week i was helping a special ed teacher make a smart notebook to use with one of his students to make change. Then along comes this feed with a link to CASH OUT and i just wanted to start screaming! There is was…..right there in front of me. An idea i could use. Then i saw the Build your Wild Self website and i was off to fantasy land to create my new AVATAR look. If i didn’t have my GOOGLE reader set up with these great links, i would never have found these new ideas. Since most of the schools i work in have smartboards, this will be a link that i can definitely share with my teachers.
