k12learning2.0

I spent the morning using delicious to find information that I could use when teaching Johnny Tremain.  I already have 25 bookmarks, and this is only on one topic!  I have used bookmarks before, but found it difficult to go back and find a particular web page once I got too many bookmarks.  Also, every time I got a new computer, I lost all of my old book marks because I did not want to go to the trouble to save all of them and transfer them to the new computer.  I love being able to add tags so that when I go back to find a page I will have a better chance of being able to locate it.  I tried the stretch activities, and can’t wait to see what information the subscription on the Black Plague will bring to me.  I will be able to use that with The Door in the Wall, that we teach in sixth grade reading.  My delicious link is http://del.icio.us/dgnote.

I am really enjoying my (almost) daily reading in Google Reader.  One post that got me thinking about Web 2.0 is Audience Matters by Lucie deLaBruere.  It talked about the end of the school year, and she is reflecting back on how students have used some of the Web 2.0 tools throughout the year.  She is also collaborating online with members of her family and people all over to create her own video.  When talking to my students about writing, I try to emphasize to keep audience in mind.  However, traditionally, their audience has been very limited, usually to the teacher, classmates, and maybe parents.  Even in this small group, we can’t protect our students from hurtful comments from their peers.  Web 2.0 tools can make the whole world their audience, which is both exciting and terrifying.  How do we balance the exciting part of having our students communicate to people from distant points all over the world while still protecting them from the dangers of being exposed to negative, inappropriate feedback?  Letting students use the internet to find information can lead them to inappropriate web sites, but as technology continues to improve and we use the internet to bring people from all over the world into our classrooms, it will be even more difficult to shelter our students.

The first place I visited was http://www.30boxes.com where I spent about an hour playing around and putting events in the calendar boxes. I have a huge calendar on my refrigerator at home, but I like the idea of being able to access a calendar from anywhere there is a computer.

I did not spend much time at http://www.gliffy.com because I have used Inspiration.

I tried http://www.jigzone.com. I wanted to make a jigsaw from one of my own pictures, but I never did figure out how to do that. I think I got the picture downloaded, but when I tried to do something with it, it said it was no longer available. I will have to go back and play with this one again later. This would be a good activity for students to do on one of those rainy days when they cannot go outside for recess.

The http://letterpop.com site looks like it would be fun for both personal and school use. I can see sending out the annual Christmas letter using this program. It also might be fun for students to use as a variant of the “What Did You Do Last Summer?” August writing assignment.

It would be fun to use http://www.mixbook.com and have students make up an autobiography at the beginning of the school year. It could also be used to make a book about historical places or people we read about in our class novels.

The site http://mnemograph.com/ could be used when we are studying historical fiction novels such as Johnny Tremain or The Door in the Wall to make a time line of events that took place in the story, especially those events that are nonfiction.

I had lots of fun with http://www.picnik.com. I usually don’t take the time to edit my digital pictures, so consequently, I don’t know much about it. I went back and changed the size of a picture, then went back to www.jigzone.com and was able to upload the picture and make a puzzle. The reason I had trouble earlier was that the picture I tried to upload was too big. See my puzzle here!

Quizlet at http://quizlet.com was pretty similar to Quia that I presently use in my classroom. Quia does have a greater variety of games, but Quia is no longer free. One advantage that I see with Quizlet, is that it is set up to be much more interactive. I like the idea of students being able to set up their own sets of vocabulary cards, as well as use the chat box to communicate with each other.

I liked the idea behind http://sketchcast.com, but I found it rather difficult to use without a graphic tablet. It would be great to let students record their English sentence flows. I know there is a recording feature with Smart Board. If I can’t get that to work, I may come back and use this.

The http://www.tadalist.com is pretty self explanatory. I love to check off things on lists, and I could use this to go ahead and start making up that list of things that have to be done the first day of school. I like how you can drag things to put the items in the list in a different order. Maybe if I made the list on the computer, it would be easier to keep track of where I put it!

Playing at http://www.toondoo.com was fun. Students could write summaries of short stories or chapters using this website.

Creating a web page using the http://weebly.com site would be easy, but I am not sure that since I am already using Edline, I want to create another place for my parents to have to go to. It would be fun to make a page for family to use, though.

I used http://www.writeboard.com/ during an earlier lesson to write notes to add to my blog later. I like the idea of having a document accessible to others on the web. This might be a way to share lesson plan ideas with other teachers.

I enjoyed looking through all of these sites and contemplating how I might be able to incorporate them into my classroom.

Wow! I love the idea of being able to attend conferences online. I went to Anne Davis’s session “Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools.” I love the idea of being able to learn about the things presented in this conference without having to leave my own home. Most everything Anne Davis talked about centered around using blogging in the classroom and tools a teacher could use to enhance blogging. Some of these tools have already been taught in this class, and some are on the list of later “Things” we will do.

Creating the slide show was easy.  Embedding it was a bit more challenging for me.  I used Animoto and found that uploading, arranging, and choosing music only took a few minutes.  It took about 10 minutes for them to create the show.  I then clicked the thumbtack to find that elusive code, but nothing came up.  I finally closed the page and used the link that Animoto emailed me to open it again, and then I was able to pull up the other tabs in the directions.  I had to try a few times to get it embedded in my wikki page; I think I may have missed a character or two when I selected and copied the code the first time, but I persevered and finally made it!  Here is the link to the slide show on my wikki page.

picture by claireglen

This assignment was so fun! I enjoyed looking through pictures and checking out how I might use Flickr in my classroom. I searched for pictures about the American Revolution that might relate to Johnny Tremain. I liked the idea of letting students make vocabulary cards using Flickr pictures; they could choose different pictures to represent meanings of the words, especially words that have similar meanings. I also liked the idea of having students find pictures to represent the setting of a book. Unfortunately, I ran across some pictures that would be very inappropriate for my students to see. Is there a way to set it up so that our students

would not be able to access these pictures? I guess we could always download pictures into a folder for students to choose from. In my classroom, I also need to do a better job educating my students on making sure it is okay to use a picture in a project, then they need to give credit to the person that took the picture. I have so much to learn about copyright laws.

I have often wondered about copyright laws – what can I use in my classroom, and what am I not allowed to use because it is copyrighted?  I did not know about CC.  I think I might have seen it before, and just assumed it meant the same thing as a copyright.  I explored some of the links in this lesson, but I need to explore them even more before I understand this topic.  Some of the links just sent me to examples of worksheets, videos, Cd’s, etc. that I could buy, while others sent me to worksheets or web pages that I could use right from the website.  It is exciting that all of this material is on the web that we can use.  I can see sharing worksheets and projects on the web, but I think I would want to make sure that if someone added to it or made corrections on it that I would get a copy of their improvements.

There were two major organization styles that I noticed when I looked through the list of wikis. The first was a project-oriented wiki, where the wiki was set up for students to complete a project online. I can see how this could be very useful in the classroom, and it would be very useful for several classrooms to collaborate on a particular project. Teachers posted assignments, and students completed the work and posted it to the wiki. Students could then edit or add to each others’ work. 1001 Flat World Tales is one example where students from all over the world shared story-telling. There was a link to a website where students even shared some of their stories via podcasts. I also liked the Discovery Utopias project site because I could see how students really had to use higher-level thinking skills to decide what would make up a utopian society, and how would they create their own utopian society. Of course I had to check out Turn Homeward, Hannalee, since I know the people that created that site. I liked the organization of that site; it seemed much easier to find everything, and I could see how I could do something similar with some of the novels I teach in sixth grade. The second major type of organization for wikis that I noticed was the wiki set up for the materials covered in a particular class. Examples of this type of set up were Dr. Reich’s Chemistry Wiki, FHS Wolves Den, and Room 15 Wiki. I found these somewhat similar to the way programs such as Blackboard and Edline are set up in that homework is posted, assignments are explained, and documents can be accessed by students. However, there could be a lot more interactivity between students and teachers by using wikis. I liked the idea of having pages where students could set up class reviews for tests. It also seems easier to import different kinds of media than in Blackboard or Edline.

The blogs that I am enjoying the most so far are the blog feeds that I have set up for the authors of the novels I teach in my reading classes.  I have set up blog feeds for Jean Craighead George, Marguerite de Angeli, and Esther Forbes.  It is fun to see who has the most information showing up each day.  I have started putting my blog sites into folders, and I can see how important managing my blogs is going to become.  I am continually adding blogs, and if I am not careful, I will have more information than I will possibly have time to look at!  I am glad that I am taking this course over the summer so that I have more time just to have fun looking at what is available. 

I really liked the blog I saw on Cool Cat Teacher about 12 Brain Rules and a cool slideshare from Garr Reynolds.  It is a page with a funny video on trying to multitask, which I have never been good at anyway! 

It was fun trying the news feed on Google News.  I searched for education in Atlanta.

I was intrigued by one of the entries in the Techlearning blog called “A challenge to embrace digital texts.” that described a website called “Read the Words.”  The author of the blog, Wesley Fryer, was able to upload two articles to his MP3 player that he had been wanting to read, but hadn’t found the time.  After uploading the articles, he was able to listen to the articles on his way to work.  I could see using this website in the classroom, especially for auditory learners, anytime they are doing research on the web.  If a student found an interesting article, he could upload it to an MP3 player and listen to it at home.