In April I was so busy with the rest of my life, I had every moment scheduled. Every single one, from getting up to getting to bed. And, I fell behind. Still, I never really considered not finishing. Once I started a task, it was pretty easy to get lost in it. And that makes Web 2.0 no different that anything else I have enjoyed learning about.
Besides the blog and enjoying the Free Tech for Teachers reading, I have been weaving together, in the back of my mind, how I will use some of the new ideas to help students become a community around evaluating source material. My students do an intense science research prject. Although it is a study, they have to do background reading. I have noticed that I am seeing them use some of the same soures year after year. I suspect that this is because they are doing the most shallow searches possible. I would like to be able to deepen their ability to evaluate material. And, I would love to have them do this collaboratively. Stacey Baker has her high school students work on a wiki to peer review sources (her class blog: Extreme Biology.) I think a combination of this plus perhaps Delicious and Pageflakes would be great!
My second ambition is to work on a class website using Google sites. I set one up, and it is feeling somewhat familiar because of the wiki. I would like my students’ research to have a web home, for my own future students and perhaps even for others!
Finally, I guess this course was an opportunity for me to prove to myself that I could work on a course while I am work! The flexibility helped a lot, and I am interesting to see if other courses will present themeselves…sometime…somewhere!
I have been using a Ning to log just about every day of every class I have taught this year. Actually, the writing and the photography have usually been done by my students. I edit and post, and we start each class with the logger and digital document-er presenting their posts. I adopted this idea from my past summer being a participant with the Hudson Valley Writing Project Summer Institute.
I was disappointed though, that students have to be 13 to join the Ning. Then doubly disappointed that Ning will not be free anymore. And, because my Ning posts are on my school Ning (with each of my class sections as a “group,”) I am finding the the Ning is getting a little crowded.
So, it has been great, but for this purpose, I plan to have my log be in a blog next year.
I do like the Ning format though, and hope that it will continue to be useful for education, even if “free” goes away.
I liked the Web 2.0 classroom Ning because there are so many members. It was fun to browse through the Forum and sort of “eavesdrop.” I can see that new tools kind of become short term fads and this generates tons of new ideas.
I have been getting e-mails from this network all year about the Elluminate events, and I hope to attend one soon.
I was not a faithful reader in April. Now it is May and I just cleaned up. I admit that the more than 800 items was rather intimidating. But, now my reader is empty. I accomplished this by:
Realizing that Free Tech for Teachers was my absolute favorite, and it was worth a careful look but:
Most of the science sites I had book marked were not. The information was great, but I just wasn’t going to plow through it. So, I unsubscribed, and will probably resubscribe when I feel like I might enjoy reading some new science every day. Access to a lot of this information is available elsewhere. Also, ‘science’ is a big topic and I am actually not interested in some of the items that were coming at me from the more general sites.
I will keep up with some of the other technology sites. And, they include science tools sometimes. I have a National Geographic site bookmarked about hidden water. For an advisory activity I bookmarked a site about making flags called “We are all Multicolored.” And, the NYT, even though I am highly suspicious of them after my Pageflakes fiasco, had a good graphic about the tragic oil gushing into the gulf.
Overall, Reader will be one of the best aspects of the course for me.
Pageflakes looks great! I had a nice start page configured and was just about ready to commit to it as a new homepage. I was imagining that I could have students help design a useful course page too. I set up a calendar for them.
Then I imported a flake that would feed the NY Times to my page, and BAM! It imbedded an automatic redirect. I see a glimpse of my page and then get the Times. I can’t log on to the forum to send an e-mail, because as soon as I log on….
I deleted all memory of the Times and Pageflakes from my cache, hoping that would lead to a fix. No luck.
I might have to abandon the account and start over, but I hope there will be a better solution at some point.
So it goes…
Our team English teacher became the first convert. Then the history teacher and I joined her. We have been using Google docs for most of the year.
I use Google docs for HW assignments that don’t need my careful editing, and for assignments that I really want to be sure that students don’t lose! I use Google spreadsheets for entering data sets that need to be accessed by the whole class. I use Google forms for quick pre-quizzes to help direct my teaching, and for feedback from the student to me.
As an adivsor, I have used them for self reflections, because I can write back to the students on the doc, and can keep track of their goals that way.
Our team is using a spreadsheet for a few students who would benefit from daily feedback. Every teacher can edit and the student can view.
I started a Google site for the Science Symposium. This is going to take me a while to learn to edit well. I want a place where all my student projects can be indexed so that future students can “browse” for ideas.
What I want: A slicker comment editor. While inserting comments is possible, I don’t find it super quick. I miss the Word feature that puts comments in the margin with red lines connecting to the text being commented on. I think that would make it easier for my students. One day…
This is a favorite of mine.
Just for the fun of it
I always appreciate how many of the bystanders smile instead of looking puzzled or annoyed.
Truth be told, I am not sure it worked!
It is still buffering, but so was the podcast that was uploaded right before mine. So, maybe it will buffer eventually. And, the comment I left for someone else is still loading, so maybe there is a website issue.
So, I am thinking that podcasting may be the fussiest task so far.
Also, I am not sure I like hearing my voice….
On the other hand, if I could record some of the things I have to say over and over to students, then I would not have to hear my voice less, right?
I have a few subscriptions, and have liked Science Friday (an NPR show) and Scientific American. I don’t “keep up,” though. Mostly this is because I don’t have a long commute, and don’t have lots of time to do this type of listening–where I can pay attention to what I am hearing but be busy with something else.
I have thought about assigning some podcasts to students. When I have students listen in class without anything visual, I have noticed that it is hard for them to focus. In December I inadvertently projected a visualizer while we were listening to a local public radio program. The students were much more focused, so I would do this again. Looking at motion or drawing while listening seems to be a good focuser. [Which brings me to the offshoot thought that I should ask my 71 year old father if he really used to just sit beside the radio to listen to The Shadow, or if he kept his hands busy in some fashion...]
What I really want to learn is how to have students make podcasts…
This is a great tool.
I typed in Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. I read it a few month ago, and can’t wait to read the second in the trilogy. The Girl Who Played with Fire, (I think that is the title.) It is on my shelf, but I don’t trust myself to start it until I finish a few more projects…
Anyway, what was neat about Library Thing was that the recommendations had books that didn’t seem closely related, but that I had either read or planned to read. That is about the handiest tool a reader could have. A reasonable predictor of what might be a good read.
As for classroom: A few months ago I was looking for young adult books about students with LD’s, or students who were related or friends with students with LD’s. I used Amazon and just did a general Google search for a list. This might be a better way though.
Delicious…
Since I already had an account, I took the opportunity to get acquainted with my old sites.
It will be dull. I guess when I set it up, I had my bookmarks marked private as default. I did share one of my favorite bookmarks about multitasking to the k12learning20 tag though. My students HATE hearing this NPR story.
So, my apologies for that. Things should look up in the future now that I understand the social nature of Delicious. Somehow that missed me on the first pass, about a year or so ago.
The best application I can think of in the future is to have students share sources. I attended a great workshop this weekend with a teacher who has her high school students peer review sources for each other. You can only use a source that another classmate has agreed meets the teacher’s criteria. She has her sources set up on a Wiki, but we could do it through Delicious….as long as Delicious lets students have accounts…something else to investigate.
