FINALLY! I’m at the end of my journey through some of the digital world! My suitcase is full of souvenirs, my head has been spinning for most of the ride, and my eyes are bloodshot! Too much time looking at the computer screen! This ride has been difficult and bumpy for me, and I definitely spent more than 30 hours on this journey. That said, I can say it has been a real eye opener for me. I now have a better understanding for what Web 2.0 means and how important it is for teachers to use these tools in the classroom. Before I can use the tools with students, I must be able to navigate through them. That’s the value of this course. I am going to try to add a few of the tools this year and continue to add more in the coming years. I will continue to use Google Reader, Delicious, and flickr this year. I hope to work in a wiki sometime soon also. I realize that I can not add every tool this year, so I will wait to try podcsting. I’m excited to gain tools that will help me gather and organize resources and information. What a time saver for me! I liked Google before, but now I love it! I created presentations in Bubbleshare and Rockyou that I will use this year in my classes. Fun stuff! My journey was made easier because of my captain’s directions and examples. Thanks Shelley for modeling and guiding me through the digital world!!!
I must say I have been turned off to some of the social networking sites (Facebook/MySpace) and have not really checked them out. Now I have a better grasp as to what they are and how they do allow people to be connected. I found it interesting to skim and explore Classroom 2.0. I agree that it is an amazing social networking resource for educators. This type of social networking site interests me more that the two popular ones at this time. I know my 6th graders are using social networking sites, so I need to get on board! I do want them to be productive responsible users of these tools, so I need to model and discuss proper usage in the classroom. I know this will help me in my teaching. I looked in Forum and found an article discussing Teaching Writing with web 2.0 and found it had 72 hits. This spoke to me, so I checked out some of the discussions. I now understand how you can put out a question, and with luck you will get helpful answers. I even found some good ideas for my classroom and also found myself wanting to respond. It was very easy for me to find a couple of videos that gave me ideas. I’m sure I could get help with problems as well as get fresh ideas form this site. I need to get connected to my fellow teachers as well as to teachers all over the world. This site is a good beginning for me. Maybe my students could even discuss a novel in a social networking site. WOW! I had no idea there were so many Ning sites, and that Facebook had educational material! I liked Nancy Willard’s article and agree that there are both positive and negative aspects to social networking. It would be nice to be a part of a group discussing topics. I found the Passionate Teachers site interesting for me.
I’m glad I am subscribing to Free Technologies 4 Teachers. I found a post discussing 7 most Popular posts of the previous week. This feature to this site will be very helpful for me. I can check it each week and find new sites posted. I found 10 different places where you can make flashcards. I have used Quia in the past, but will try out a couple of these this year. We make lots of flaskcards in reading, and it would be fun for the students to use different sites throughout the year. This article also mentioned that Google Docs is adding more new templates. I’ll be checking this out. GO GOOGLE DOCS!! I also viewed Chris Lehmann’s video “Technology Needs to be like Oxygen” that is on Free Technologies 4 Teachers. This gave me much “food for thought”. I liked what he had to say! Check out some of his points and see if you agree.
Chris said:
1. “Technology needs to be like oxygen.”
2. “Good data costs a lot more than we want to spend. Good data is the work kids do every single day, it’s not the answers they get on a test.”
3. “We teach kids, not subjects.”
4. “You want to see what kids have learned, give them a project.”
5. “We have one thing left to teach and that is… wisdom.”
I will be watching this video again and thinking of a project I can have my students complete for one of the subjects I teach. Then, according to Chris, I will really see what they have learned! Maybe I can even teach some “WISDOM” this year!!
Awesome! My head is really spinning by now. Pageflakes is a good place to customize my web content. I liked the idea of collecting info from around the world. i can see my page doing some of that. This will save me time each day from looking up each site. I have been using iGoogle, but I now see that I could do more with the PageflakesI played around with my Pageflake page, changed a few things, and will add more podcasts in the future. I would probably not put homework and assignments on my page since I place them on my WA page. I could create another page for my classes. I will add more content to my page when I have more time to search.
For some reason the music on this Smile Box doesn’t play correctly after I put it into this blog, so I will be working to get the bugs worked out. Just wanted you to see what I was working on.
I LOVE GOOGLE DOCS! I was introduced to Google docs last year and had an opportunity to collaborate on a few documents with other teachers. We were all learning, so the documents were very simple. This time around I have learned how to download one of my documents, format, add pictures, and make presentations. I have learned that I can use them in other ways. I love to be able to collaborate with others and edit simultaneously!! Being able to do this is a time saver and paper saver also! Google Docs keeps all the revisions also. Great feature! I can’t wait to make a spreadsheet and a presentation. I could use a spreadsheet to collect information about the books my students read over the summer, keep track of the completion of students writing assignments, and SRA stories read. I can create Shurley English, open house, and reading skills presentations. Debbie and I can collaborate to make out lesson plans, and I can invite teachers to a party by using the document to let them sign up to bring food dishes. I love Google Docs and will be using it more this year!!:)
I found it easy to search You Tube and Teacher Tube. In the past I haven’t spent time exploring these two sites. In You tube I searched Will Richardson, giraffes, American Revolution, Son’s of Liberty, Twitter, Folktales, and how to paint a room. (I’m not a very good painter, so I could use some extra guidance.) I reviewed several videos for each topic. I can use Son’s of Liberty as an intro when teaching the novel, Johnny Tremain, and one of the folktale videos with our reading folktale unit. I am always look for new material to use with English, and I found an interesting sentence structure video in Teacher Tube. It could be used as tutorial help, and/or a way to review what students know at the beginning of school. It could even be an alternate way to explain how to build sentences. This would be useful for new 6th graders who don’t have a strong grammar base. I can see how it would be easy to let the students make a video and put it on Teacher Tube. I was disappointed with the volume of the students on some of the student made videos. I had to turn my sound up, and even then it was hard to hear the students. I think this would be a fun project to try.
Podcasting wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. My recorder only let me record 60seconds, so it took me a while to figure out that I could hit the record button again and continue recording. After completing my first podcast, I had to make a second podcast! FUN! I can see many possibilities for using a podcast in my classroom. Ex.-record SRA Listening Lessons, steps for Shurley English sentence classifications, poems, historical information to use with a novel, class assignments and lectures to be used when I am absent, teacher/student book talks, weekly news information to put on my WA website, creative journal writing prompts, and stories for students and my grandchildren. Students could even record the Shirley English Jingles to put on the homework website. It would be great if I could get other faculty members to help me and make the recording with me, so the students could have “mystery readers”. I think they would think it was cool to hear another teacher’s voice or even Mr. Phillips voice. I’ll try to work that into my classes this year!! Lots of classroom tech projects to get started! Subscribe Free Add to my Page
This is my first experience with podcasting. I haven’t stepped into the iPod or MP3 Player world as of yet! Guess I’d better get my daughters to go shopping with me, and then give me several tutorial lessons. I’m sure my students could help me! Mamma Berry needs to get some new gadgets!! ASAP! After this course I now feel the need to know what the students know about the high tech world, so I guess I will be checking out iTunes also. It will take me some time to search for podcasts that I could use in the classroom, but I did find two of interest to me, so I tagged them to my Google Reader. The first one was “Tech Chick Tips Podcast” from Learn Out Loud. The latest podcast was a discussion about the NECC ’09 Conference in Washington. Two ladies created this podcast while driving in a rental car to their hotel in DC. Interestin! Must be easy to do if they can do it on their phone while traveling. Another podcast in this same series had an interesting interview with Will Richardson. He was asked to name one web 2.0 tool that he thought teachers should get involved with at the present time, and he said it would be Twitter. (I haven’t checked Twitter out yet either.) He felt that Twitter was an easier way for people to connect, and that maybe it would get more teachers involved. Next I checked out the NPR Podcast Directory and found “Georgia Stories”. This is interesting to me because I can brush-up on my Georgia history, and I might be able to use some of the stories in my reading class. These two podcasts were of value to me, but some that I checked out were not. In the future I would like to consider making a podcast covering Shurley English or reading a story to use with my students.
This was my first exposure to Library Thing. It was fun to travel through the site exploring both books I’ve read and would like to read. Tagging is a great feature. It’s hard to rap my mind around the fact that there are so many web 2.0 tools that allow you to catalog and store information. I could use this both personally and professionally. I could catalog my classroom collection of books and even start a catalog of the books my 6th grade students read. Then when a student asks me for a suggestion, it would be easy for me to pull together a list of suggestions. I could catalog books I’ve read. Being able to check my list while at the bookstore is very exciting for me. Sometimes you can’t remember if you have a read a book or not, or at least I can’t. This feature would allow me to not purchase a book I have already read! Sharing lists with others is also interesting.
