Most of the blogs that I follow have been recommended to me by word of mouth or by one of the blogs I already read. Actually looking for blogs has been a little more difficult than I thought it would be.
I am not a big fan of any of the blog search tools that were provided on the Thing 11 page. Of the four, Google Blog Search was the easiest to use and the most helpful. I was able to find a few good blogs about special education, but it took a lot of wading through to find what I was really looking for. Once I got some practice at finding blogs, it was a lot easier to find relevant information.
I did not find the other very useful. If I were to rate the four ways to find RSS feeds from best to worst, the order that I would use is:
Google Blog Search
Technorati
Topix.net
Syndic8.com
If I wasn't so picky, I probably would have been able to find good blogs at Technorati and Topix.net. Syndic8.com was totally useless; I was confused the whole time I was searching. When I did think I found something useful, it was usually a dead link, which was incredibly frustrating.
I did finally find some good feeds to follow. My favorite finds were Unwrapping the Gifted, Irresistible Ideas for Play-based Learning, and Easy IEP Help.
Unwrapping the Gifted contains information on, you guessed it, gifted education. Gifted education is something that I find interesting, but I am not sure that I would ever want to teach gifted students. Hopefully this blog will give me a better idea about how gifted education works.
Irresistible Ideas for Play-based Learning is a website run by two early childhood education teachers from Australia. The project ideas on the site are a lot of fun, and the pictures of their students are adorable.
Easy IEP Help is an interesting combination of quirky news, personal insight, and useful information. The writing is wonderful, even if the posts on actual IEP help are few and far between.
While I'm glad that I took the time to look at these ways to find RSS feeds, I think I will probably still use the recommendations and word of mouth technique to find useful blogs and websites about education topics.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thing 10: My New Favorite Thing
I love RSS Readers!
Keeping track of information is a huge problem for me; I tend to be very forgetful and I get distracted easily. As you can probably guess, that is a really bad combination. One of my biggest problems is remembering what I read on a particular blog so that I can start at the next post. Google Reader is a wonderful tool for me, because it remembers what I have read and what I haven't read, making it very easy to keep up with everything. And it is all in one space, which removes the need for me to visit blog after blog only to realize that nothing has been posted.
One of the features that I love about Google Reader is how easy it is to sort blogs into folders by category. I can easily see how much I need to read in each of my folders. So far I have folders for Education 3040, Special Education, General Education, Catholicism, and News.
RSS Readers are a great way for teachers to have quick access to information on a variety of topics, from lesson plans to assistive technology to education law. Teachers could also use RSS to keep track of blogs written by their students. Instead of having to visit every blog to check for updates, they just get new posts all in one place.
Keeping track of information is a huge problem for me; I tend to be very forgetful and I get distracted easily. As you can probably guess, that is a really bad combination. One of my biggest problems is remembering what I read on a particular blog so that I can start at the next post. Google Reader is a wonderful tool for me, because it remembers what I have read and what I haven't read, making it very easy to keep up with everything. And it is all in one space, which removes the need for me to visit blog after blog only to realize that nothing has been posted.
One of the features that I love about Google Reader is how easy it is to sort blogs into folders by category. I can easily see how much I need to read in each of my folders. So far I have folders for Education 3040, Special Education, General Education, Catholicism, and News.
RSS Readers are a great way for teachers to have quick access to information on a variety of topics, from lesson plans to assistive technology to education law. Teachers could also use RSS to keep track of blogs written by their students. Instead of having to visit every blog to check for updates, they just get new posts all in one place.
Thing 9: Online Image Generators
I have spent the last few hours playing around with a few of the sign generators. It's times like these that I wish I was more creative. I started with the Happy Face Generator. I think that the different smiley faces are really cute, and they are also quite practical. At the therapy group I used to work for, we had a poster on the wall with different emotions represented by smiley faces. Most of the students we worked with were nonverbal, so the chart was there to encourage the children to share their emotions by pointing to the pictures. With the smiley face generators, you could even add little talk bubbles that say things like "I am mad" or "I am frustrated" to the pictures to encourage verbal students to speak their emotions after they identify them.
I decided to use the Happy Face Generator sign generator to make one of those motivational signs that you see all over classroom walls. Here it is:
It was actually really easy. You just replace the text with the words that you would like. Sometimes you have to mess with the placement of the words a little, but with a little trial and error I was able to make sure that the words fit into the sign.
I played around with a lot of other image generating sights, and I really liked ImageChef. The problem is, I am really picky and a bit of a perfectionist. I tried to make a few different things, but nothing really turned out like I wanted it to look. I'm going to try and go back to ImageChef, but I will need a lot of time if I ever want to use it for a project.
I decided to use the Happy Face Generator sign generator to make one of those motivational signs that you see all over classroom walls. Here it is:
It was actually really easy. You just replace the text with the words that you would like. Sometimes you have to mess with the placement of the words a little, but with a little trial and error I was able to make sure that the words fit into the sign.
I played around with a lot of other image generating sights, and I really liked ImageChef. The problem is, I am really picky and a bit of a perfectionist. I tried to make a few different things, but nothing really turned out like I wanted it to look. I'm going to try and go back to ImageChef, but I will need a lot of time if I ever want to use it for a project.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Thing 7: Flickr
I was excited to be able to check out Flickr, especially to find pictures that I could use for a project. Like I said in a previous post, I am not much of a photographer, but I understand the importance of using images to enhance people's understandings of concepts and ideas. So I had a little bit of trouble choosing between option one and option two for Thing 7. I decided to do some of both.
Having access to a picture bank, which contains more photographs than I could ever hope to take, is exciting. I love historic places, but I don't get to travel to any very often (I'm usually overruled by my three brothers). Seeing pictures is the next best thing.
I decided to do a search for pictures from Colonial Williamsburg (My very favorite place in the world). I searched through the group on Colonial Williamsburg and the Williamsburg tags for a picture that I would like to blog about.
This is the picture I chose:
I chose this picture because it reminds me of one of my favorite vacation memories. The man in the picture is a reenactment specialist at Colonial Williamsburg who plays Lafayette. He talked to my family, in character, for almost an hour about the history of Williamsburg and Lafayette's role in the Revolutionary War. Even my younger brothers thought he was interesting (it is hard to get 12 and 10 year old boys interested in anything to do with history).
I was surprised by how easy it was to find pictures. I tried to search for a few different topics before I settled on Colonial Williamsburg, Each time, I found exactly what I was looking for without having to try seven different synonyms and twelve different spellings for each thing I was looking for.
I also uploaded some pictures of my family, including my puppy dog.
His name is Gibson, and he is a lab/ rat terrier mix. He is the sweetest dog in the world, and I don;t get to see him enough.
Setting up an account was easy, and uploading pictures wasn't much harder. It's rather exciting when things go smoothly.
In an earlier post, I wrote about my experience with Photobucket. I like both sites, but I would use them for different things. Flickr is better to use if I am looking for pictures that I do not already have. Photobucket is better for editing photos I do have. If I was working a project, I might use both; Flickr to find the photos to include and Photobucket to actually create the project.
I think that photo sharing sites do have a place in the classroom. First, photo sharing sites are a quick and easy way to share information. Have you ever tried to get information about a class project from a first grader, or a high school boy? One is unable to clearly share information, and the other is (usually) unwilling. Images are an easy way for parents to see what is going on in the classroom. Students can also use photo sharing websites to share information and to create projects.
I'm not sure I would use photo sharing sites to share personal photos on a regular basis. First, I don't have that many to share, and second, I can already share photos with the important people in my life on Facebook.
Here is the link to the top image:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/treehuggergal/4843936181/
Having access to a picture bank, which contains more photographs than I could ever hope to take, is exciting. I love historic places, but I don't get to travel to any very often (I'm usually overruled by my three brothers). Seeing pictures is the next best thing.
I decided to do a search for pictures from Colonial Williamsburg (My very favorite place in the world). I searched through the group on Colonial Williamsburg and the Williamsburg tags for a picture that I would like to blog about.
This is the picture I chose:
Photo by Jim Frost
I chose this picture because it reminds me of one of my favorite vacation memories. The man in the picture is a reenactment specialist at Colonial Williamsburg who plays Lafayette. He talked to my family, in character, for almost an hour about the history of Williamsburg and Lafayette's role in the Revolutionary War. Even my younger brothers thought he was interesting (it is hard to get 12 and 10 year old boys interested in anything to do with history).
I was surprised by how easy it was to find pictures. I tried to search for a few different topics before I settled on Colonial Williamsburg, Each time, I found exactly what I was looking for without having to try seven different synonyms and twelve different spellings for each thing I was looking for.
I also uploaded some pictures of my family, including my puppy dog.
His name is Gibson, and he is a lab/ rat terrier mix. He is the sweetest dog in the world, and I don;t get to see him enough.
Setting up an account was easy, and uploading pictures wasn't much harder. It's rather exciting when things go smoothly.
In an earlier post, I wrote about my experience with Photobucket. I like both sites, but I would use them for different things. Flickr is better to use if I am looking for pictures that I do not already have. Photobucket is better for editing photos I do have. If I was working a project, I might use both; Flickr to find the photos to include and Photobucket to actually create the project.
I think that photo sharing sites do have a place in the classroom. First, photo sharing sites are a quick and easy way to share information. Have you ever tried to get information about a class project from a first grader, or a high school boy? One is unable to clearly share information, and the other is (usually) unwilling. Images are an easy way for parents to see what is going on in the classroom. Students can also use photo sharing websites to share information and to create projects.
I'm not sure I would use photo sharing sites to share personal photos on a regular basis. First, I don't have that many to share, and second, I can already share photos with the important people in my life on Facebook.
Here is the link to the top image:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/treehuggergal/4843936181/
Thing 6b: Exploring Grooveshark
So, when I looked at Thing 7 I realized that we were already supposed to explore a photo sharing site, so I decided that it might be a good idea to comment on a second site. I chose to comment on Grooveshark, because that I have become pretty familiar with in the last two weeks (I wanted to check it out after Dr. Luck talked about it on the first day of class).
I cannot get work done when it is quiet. I have three younger brothers, so my house was always loud growing up. Quiet makes me nervous, because quiet means that someone is planning something nefarious.
When I use Grooveshark, I can create playlists like the ones used on iTunes without having to pay for the music (although if you want to make it portable you have to subscribe to Grooveshark Anywhere). Setting up a playlist is fairly easy. You can search for either the artist or the song that you are looking for in order to find music. If you look up music by artist, then you can look through a list of songs by that author, view playlists that other Grooveshark users have created that contain songs by that artist, and see what events that artist might have in the next few months.
I do wish that Grooveshark was a little easier to search. If you are looking for a song that also happens to be the name of a musical group and the name of an album, Grooveshark pulls up all songs connected to that information. An advanced search feature would make searching a lot easier.
I often think that people discount the power that music has in helping people learn. I'm an auditory learner, so I have always used music as a way to remember things. I can still sing most of the Schoolhouse Rock! songs that I learned in elementary school. Most of the Schoolhouse Rock! songs are actually on Grooveshark. In addition to listening to music for what you can learn, it can also be fun (a shock to everyone, I'm sure). I was reading a post about how teachers incorporated movement into their day, and one elementary teacher talked about how he uses music during his transitions. Between math and reading, for example, he would play music. While the music was on, students moved around the room putting books away and getting what they needed for the next lesson. I'm sure that there are plenty of great ideas for how to use music in class.
Here's the link for Grooveshark!
I cannot get work done when it is quiet. I have three younger brothers, so my house was always loud growing up. Quiet makes me nervous, because quiet means that someone is planning something nefarious.
When I use Grooveshark, I can create playlists like the ones used on iTunes without having to pay for the music (although if you want to make it portable you have to subscribe to Grooveshark Anywhere). Setting up a playlist is fairly easy. You can search for either the artist or the song that you are looking for in order to find music. If you look up music by artist, then you can look through a list of songs by that author, view playlists that other Grooveshark users have created that contain songs by that artist, and see what events that artist might have in the next few months.
I do wish that Grooveshark was a little easier to search. If you are looking for a song that also happens to be the name of a musical group and the name of an album, Grooveshark pulls up all songs connected to that information. An advanced search feature would make searching a lot easier.
I often think that people discount the power that music has in helping people learn. I'm an auditory learner, so I have always used music as a way to remember things. I can still sing most of the Schoolhouse Rock! songs that I learned in elementary school. Most of the Schoolhouse Rock! songs are actually on Grooveshark. In addition to listening to music for what you can learn, it can also be fun (a shock to everyone, I'm sure). I was reading a post about how teachers incorporated movement into their day, and one elementary teacher talked about how he uses music during his transitions. Between math and reading, for example, he would play music. While the music was on, students moved around the room putting books away and getting what they needed for the next lesson. I'm sure that there are plenty of great ideas for how to use music in class.
Here's the link for Grooveshark!
Thing 6: Exploring Photobucket
I'm not much of a photographer, but I decided that it might be fun to explore Photobucket. I have some experience manipulating photographs (I worked on my high school newspaper staff), but most of the software that I worked with was pretty pricey. I wanted to see how a free, online photo sharing and editing site compared.
Photobucket was really easy to use. Uploading photos was easy, you just clicked the big, green upload photos button and select what you wanted to upload. All the photos uploaded quickly, it only took a couple of minutes to upload over 150 images (I decided to upload an entire album from a family trip).
I played with several of the editing tools that Photobucket provides. I cropped several pictures and used some of the tinting and distortion features. After editing some individual photographs, I also made a slide show. It was very easy, all that you had to do is follow the directions on the page. I even put text on the pictures in the slide show.
I think that photographs are a great way for teachers to share activities in the classroom with the family's of their students. As wonderful as newsletters are, seeing a picture can often convey what is happening a little clearer. A slide show, complete with text, could be a great way for parents to see what happened on a field trip or an entire week.
Students could also use Photobucket to create photo slide shows. Young children (and not so young children) would probably enjoy playing with the different distortion tools and creating photo collages.
Here is one of the photos that I edited using Photobucket. I cropped the photo and used the greyscale tool to make it black and white.
The image is of my brothers. The rest of this post is just going to be me bragging about them. The one in the middle is Timothy. He is seventeen and about to graduate from high school. As you can see, he got all the height in the family (he is a full foot taller than I am). He is also incredibly smart; he got a 32 on his ACT, with perfect scores in both English and reading. His biggest interest is music, and he plays more instruments than I can keep track of. Right now he is the bassist for his school's rock and soul band and jazz band. The rock and soul band was named one of the top four high school bands in the Blues/Rock/Pop category last year (we are still waiting to hear about this year).
Matthew (on the left) just turned thirteen. He is a great athlete. He plays baseball, soccer, and golf, swims on his school swim team, and is starting to get interested in triathlons. His fastest times for swimming are a 34 second 50 meter freestyle and a 33 second 50 meter backstroke. He was the third best golfer for his age group in the state of Tennessee two seasons ago, but has only been playing for his school team since. He also participates in forensics (competitive acting); he won first place in duo improv and third place in pantomime in his last two competitions. He also acts in school plays-- he played the herald in Cinderella and was just cast as Chin Ho in Thoroughly Modern Millie.
Andrew is the youngest at eleven. He is also a super athlete, but running is his favorite activity (he also plays soccer, baseball, and golf). He is the fastest eleven year old male distance runner in Shelby County, TN. His fastest 5k time is 21 minutes 20 seconds. He is also a budding musician (piano and trumpet) and getting involved in plays and musicals.
Oops! I almost forgot the link!
Photobucket was really easy to use. Uploading photos was easy, you just clicked the big, green upload photos button and select what you wanted to upload. All the photos uploaded quickly, it only took a couple of minutes to upload over 150 images (I decided to upload an entire album from a family trip).
I played with several of the editing tools that Photobucket provides. I cropped several pictures and used some of the tinting and distortion features. After editing some individual photographs, I also made a slide show. It was very easy, all that you had to do is follow the directions on the page. I even put text on the pictures in the slide show.
I think that photographs are a great way for teachers to share activities in the classroom with the family's of their students. As wonderful as newsletters are, seeing a picture can often convey what is happening a little clearer. A slide show, complete with text, could be a great way for parents to see what happened on a field trip or an entire week.
Students could also use Photobucket to create photo slide shows. Young children (and not so young children) would probably enjoy playing with the different distortion tools and creating photo collages.
Here is one of the photos that I edited using Photobucket. I cropped the photo and used the greyscale tool to make it black and white.
The image is of my brothers. The rest of this post is just going to be me bragging about them. The one in the middle is Timothy. He is seventeen and about to graduate from high school. As you can see, he got all the height in the family (he is a full foot taller than I am). He is also incredibly smart; he got a 32 on his ACT, with perfect scores in both English and reading. His biggest interest is music, and he plays more instruments than I can keep track of. Right now he is the bassist for his school's rock and soul band and jazz band. The rock and soul band was named one of the top four high school bands in the Blues/Rock/Pop category last year (we are still waiting to hear about this year).
Matthew (on the left) just turned thirteen. He is a great athlete. He plays baseball, soccer, and golf, swims on his school swim team, and is starting to get interested in triathlons. His fastest times for swimming are a 34 second 50 meter freestyle and a 33 second 50 meter backstroke. He was the third best golfer for his age group in the state of Tennessee two seasons ago, but has only been playing for his school team since. He also participates in forensics (competitive acting); he won first place in duo improv and third place in pantomime in his last two competitions. He also acts in school plays-- he played the herald in Cinderella and was just cast as Chin Ho in Thoroughly Modern Millie.
Andrew is the youngest at eleven. He is also a super athlete, but running is his favorite activity (he also plays soccer, baseball, and golf). He is the fastest eleven year old male distance runner in Shelby County, TN. His fastest 5k time is 21 minutes 20 seconds. He is also a budding musician (piano and trumpet) and getting involved in plays and musicals.
Oops! I almost forgot the link!
Thing 5: What is School 2.0?
Every teacher should be an advocate for School 2.0. School 2.0 is a new way of looking at education. People tend to think of education as something that happens in a classroom, but School 2.0 breaks learning out of the classroom and brings it into the world. Learning can take place anywhere, using a variety of different tools, including emerging technology.
The wonderful thing about School 2.0 and Web 2.0 is that resources are available to everyone. Like Richard MacManus said in his article "Web 2.0 if Not About Version Numbers or Betas," Web 2.0 allows even "non-technical people" to use technology to connect to others and enhance their learning. As a non-technical person, I am always amazed by how user-friendly technology has become.
I can only imagine how School 2.0 will change education in the future. It will open up a whole new world for students everywhere. Any classroom with an internet connection can contact other classrooms from around the world, access the most current resources and learn from experts that are thousands of miles away. And as technology becomes more accessible and learning becomes more efficient, teachers will be able to give each student that help, attention and challenge that they need.
The wonderful thing about School 2.0 and Web 2.0 is that resources are available to everyone. Like Richard MacManus said in his article "Web 2.0 if Not About Version Numbers or Betas," Web 2.0 allows even "non-technical people" to use technology to connect to others and enhance their learning. As a non-technical person, I am always amazed by how user-friendly technology has become.
I can only imagine how School 2.0 will change education in the future. It will open up a whole new world for students everywhere. Any classroom with an internet connection can contact other classrooms from around the world, access the most current resources and learn from experts that are thousands of miles away. And as technology becomes more accessible and learning becomes more efficient, teachers will be able to give each student that help, attention and challenge that they need.
Thing 4: Becoming a Good Commenter
Being a good follower is hard. It requires commenting, something I have never quite gotten the hang of.
I am most definitely a lurker. I love to read blogs, but I rarely comment. Commenting requires me to be willing to engage in a conversation (this point is stressed in almost every post you read about the subject). It may seem odd that a person who enjoys blogging would be shy about commenting, but it is something that I have found to be rather common across the blogosphere.
For me, a blog is really just a place to record my thoughts. The idea that other people might be looking makes me think things through before I post them, to refine my thoughts until I decide that they are presentable. But all the thoughts are still mine. I know exactly what I am thinking when I post them. When I comment on someone else's blog, I have to not only know what I am talking about, but what someone else is talking about.
Figuring out what someone means when they are writing is difficult for me. The way I read a post is colored by my own experiences. I might think of a certain phrase with a different inflection than they intended, or the choice of words might be more or less charged from their point of view. Determining another person's emotions is sometimes difficult for me in a face-to-face conversation, even though I can read body language and facial expressions and listen for voice pitch and inflection in order to figure out what someone means. Take that away, and I am little more than clueless.
I don't want to be a Darth Commenter (I find this name for rude, angry commenters rather cute), but the only time I ever really want to comment is when I disagree with the blogger, usually quite strongly. On the discussion board for one of my classes this week, there were a lot of people who were commenting on a very controversial topic. Emotions tend to run high, and a few of the posts that were written left me wondering why people couldn't just agree to disagree. I was torn between a desire to join the "discussion" and the knowledge that posting a rant wasn't really going to help the situation.
Deciding which blogs to follow is usually rather difficult for me. I am incredibly finicky reader, blogs have to have the right mash of information and personality for me to be interested in reading them; blogs with no substance are pointless to read and blog with too much information tend to block out the personality of the person writing the post. Finding goods blogs written by my classmates, however, was easy. I decided to follow all the ones that I thought were interesting, instead of just stopping at five (and I will keep adding more as I go, but I haven't had a chance to,look at everyone's blog).
Here the list of EDUC 3040 blogs I decided to follow:
*Korina Biemesderfer's 23 Things*23 Things by LBarth*apsu23Stritzel*Armistead's Small Blog About 23 Big Things*Future History Teacher by JBrewer*Han Solo and CdeBaca*Jessica Daigle's 23 Things*M,Mitchell*School Blogs by bwood6*Shay's Stuff*
Finding outside blogs was a little more difficult. It seems that everytime I find a blog that I think is really interesting, it is too old or the posts are to infrequent. Here are the outside blogs that I decided to follow:
*SpeEd Change*Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs*
I do not comment much, because I feel like comments need to contain important information. Sometimes I don't have anything to add to the conversation. When I do comment, it is typically for two reasons: I have something to add or I feel like the blogger needs some form of encouragement. As the class progresses, I hope that I get more comfortable with commenting so that I can bring meaningful thoughts to further the online conversation.
I am most definitely a lurker. I love to read blogs, but I rarely comment. Commenting requires me to be willing to engage in a conversation (this point is stressed in almost every post you read about the subject). It may seem odd that a person who enjoys blogging would be shy about commenting, but it is something that I have found to be rather common across the blogosphere.
For me, a blog is really just a place to record my thoughts. The idea that other people might be looking makes me think things through before I post them, to refine my thoughts until I decide that they are presentable. But all the thoughts are still mine. I know exactly what I am thinking when I post them. When I comment on someone else's blog, I have to not only know what I am talking about, but what someone else is talking about.
Figuring out what someone means when they are writing is difficult for me. The way I read a post is colored by my own experiences. I might think of a certain phrase with a different inflection than they intended, or the choice of words might be more or less charged from their point of view. Determining another person's emotions is sometimes difficult for me in a face-to-face conversation, even though I can read body language and facial expressions and listen for voice pitch and inflection in order to figure out what someone means. Take that away, and I am little more than clueless.
I don't want to be a Darth Commenter (I find this name for rude, angry commenters rather cute), but the only time I ever really want to comment is when I disagree with the blogger, usually quite strongly. On the discussion board for one of my classes this week, there were a lot of people who were commenting on a very controversial topic. Emotions tend to run high, and a few of the posts that were written left me wondering why people couldn't just agree to disagree. I was torn between a desire to join the "discussion" and the knowledge that posting a rant wasn't really going to help the situation.
Deciding which blogs to follow is usually rather difficult for me. I am incredibly finicky reader, blogs have to have the right mash of information and personality for me to be interested in reading them; blogs with no substance are pointless to read and blog with too much information tend to block out the personality of the person writing the post. Finding goods blogs written by my classmates, however, was easy. I decided to follow all the ones that I thought were interesting, instead of just stopping at five (and I will keep adding more as I go, but I haven't had a chance to,look at everyone's blog).
Here the list of EDUC 3040 blogs I decided to follow:
*Korina Biemesderfer's 23 Things*23 Things by LBarth*apsu23Stritzel*Armistead's Small Blog About 23 Big Things*Future History Teacher by JBrewer*Han Solo and CdeBaca*Jessica Daigle's 23 Things*M,Mitchell*School Blogs by bwood6*Shay's Stuff*
Finding outside blogs was a little more difficult. It seems that everytime I find a blog that I think is really interesting, it is too old or the posts are to infrequent. Here are the outside blogs that I decided to follow:
*SpeEd Change*Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs*
I do not comment much, because I feel like comments need to contain important information. Sometimes I don't have anything to add to the conversation. When I do comment, it is typically for two reasons: I have something to add or I feel like the blogger needs some form of encouragement. As the class progresses, I hope that I get more comfortable with commenting so that I can bring meaningful thoughts to further the online conversation.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Thing 8: Using Flickr to Create Educational Tools
My creation
Originally uploaded by mbarczak
Originally uploaded by mbarczak
I find creating things with Flickr to be pretty easy. And there are a lot of ways I can imagine using these tools in the classroom. There is a reason that every preschool class I have ever been in has puzzles. Puzzles are great for building problem solving skills and teaching students to manipulate objects to get a desired outcome.
One of the tools that I think would be incredibly useful is Mappr. Imagine using it in a history classroom. You could use the map to give students a better idea of where events took place. I think this would be a wonderful tool to help students understand the importance of historical events by making them appear closer to them. Or you could use it in math class to show real world applications for the problems that you are working on.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Thing 3: User Ideas for a Blog
Now that I have had some time to look at other people's blogs and been able to see some different things that you can do with them, I've started to think of some ways that I could use my blog in the future.
First of all, a blog is a really simple way to communicate. I know people who blog to keep up with their families. In some ways, a blog is easier to navigate than a facebook page, so people can share photos, videos and notes with less tech-savvy family members.
Teachers can use blogs in the same way that my family does. Parents can't always be in the classroom, but they might have ten minutes at night to check a blog. Teachers could put pictures of class activities and little notes about what went on in class in a blog for parents to see.
In addition to communicating daily activities with parents, teachers can use a blog to post information about homework assignments for their students. Although we might wish it weren't so, students do not always listen to teachers. I can remember forgetting to write down homework assignments in elementary school, and I wish that technology would have been advanced enough for my teachers to have a blog. Teachers can post more than homework assignments for their students as well. Links to websites, videos and articles that students could use for research would be easy to share over a blog. And it would probably interest the students more if their teacher used the same technology that they do.
Teachers can also have students start their own blogs. They could be used as an online portfolio or a way to communicate for group projects. It would also be another great way to have parents see what their students are doing. Since blogs tend to be less formal than typical classwork (essays, reports, projects), students might feel more open about sharing what they really think.
Teachers can use blogs to communicate with one another as well. I'm not sure that I truly understood what an amazing resource for teaching the Internet was until I started this class (Education 3040, Instructional Technology). By searching through blogs, I can find posts on topics from classroom management to 4th grade reading lessons to strategies for working with difficult parents. And I can post advice of my own as well. I don't always have time to evaluate every new piece of technology, research article, or teaching method that comes my way; however, I do have time to sort through some reviews and figure out what is worth trying out on my own. I am excited to see what else I could learn from reading blogs and using them with my students.
First of all, a blog is a really simple way to communicate. I know people who blog to keep up with their families. In some ways, a blog is easier to navigate than a facebook page, so people can share photos, videos and notes with less tech-savvy family members.
Teachers can use blogs in the same way that my family does. Parents can't always be in the classroom, but they might have ten minutes at night to check a blog. Teachers could put pictures of class activities and little notes about what went on in class in a blog for parents to see.
In addition to communicating daily activities with parents, teachers can use a blog to post information about homework assignments for their students. Although we might wish it weren't so, students do not always listen to teachers. I can remember forgetting to write down homework assignments in elementary school, and I wish that technology would have been advanced enough for my teachers to have a blog. Teachers can post more than homework assignments for their students as well. Links to websites, videos and articles that students could use for research would be easy to share over a blog. And it would probably interest the students more if their teacher used the same technology that they do.
Teachers can also have students start their own blogs. They could be used as an online portfolio or a way to communicate for group projects. It would also be another great way to have parents see what their students are doing. Since blogs tend to be less formal than typical classwork (essays, reports, projects), students might feel more open about sharing what they really think.
Teachers can use blogs to communicate with one another as well. I'm not sure that I truly understood what an amazing resource for teaching the Internet was until I started this class (Education 3040, Instructional Technology). By searching through blogs, I can find posts on topics from classroom management to 4th grade reading lessons to strategies for working with difficult parents. And I can post advice of my own as well. I don't always have time to evaluate every new piece of technology, research article, or teaching method that comes my way; however, I do have time to sort through some reviews and figure out what is worth trying out on my own. I am excited to see what else I could learn from reading blogs and using them with my students.
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