Tracey's Thoughts

Thing 23: I Made it!

2010-01-03T17:14:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I waited to complete this course until the last final moment, but I made it! Actually, I have 3 hours and 45 minutes to spare-not that I am a procrastinator! :) Seriously, it wasn't procrastination as much as a crazy life with two little kids and very little free time. I loved this web class! Instead of coming away from it feeling like I learned a lot, I am coming away from it with enthusiasm to learn a lot more. I feel a little overwhelmed because I've been exposed to so much new information and cool new tools to use, that I don't really know where to start. I feel like I've been exposed to a ton of new ideas that my students would love. Some I'd heard of before, but most of them, even those I'd heard of, I'd never explored before. I almost need to make a plan and decide on maybe the top five things that I learned about of the 23 and order them and decide how I can incorporate them into my teaching. I believe that incorporating as many Web 2.0 tools will engage students more in their learning, but will also better meet them where they are at in this huge wave of technology that seems to change every day. My biggest question after this course is simply, what are some of the best sources for getting tips on the latest and greatest Web 2.0 tools? An online blog? A publication? I went into this class thinking that I used a lot of technology in my classroom. Afterward, I realized that there's so much I didn't know about. How did you find out about cool tools like Image Chef? When did you first learn about Flickr and Picasa? I hate to have this course finish and then that's it. I'm hoping that someone responds to this post with some ideas for me. I'm also hoping that Ron does a Web 2.0 continued course again in the future. It really inspired me to push myself and learn and incorporate something new.

Thing 5: Photo Mashup Fun

2010-01-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that I accidentally skipped this "thing" the first time around. What fun these sites were to play with! Hands down, I had the most fun with Big Huge Labs! I can really see a lot of ways to incorporate projects from this site. How fun it would be for students to do biographies of a famous person and create a magazine cover with words and descriptions from their notes. I can also see them creating neat collages of historical events to go along with a writing assignment summarizing that event. I liked the posted idea as well of the "following the directions" assignment in a comic strip format. The other site that I really liked was Image Chef. Again, when doing a biography of a famous person, how cool would it be to create an image collage of words that describe that person or key words to go along with them like the city they grew up in or their spouse's name. I do a research unit every winter with my fourth graders. They break their topic down into five subtopics and take notes on each. They then create five different projects reflecting those notes to glue onto a presentation board that's shared during a formal presentation. For each of the five projects, the students have two different options to choose from. I definately with be incorporating Big Huge Lab and Image Chef projects into the choices. What fun! Above is a picture of my beautiful kids!

Thing 22: Online Video

2010-01-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

You Tube is not banned from my school, thank goodness. I use it here and there to show fun, informational stuff, but I've never explored Teacher Tube. I loved it and found lots I can use already. I do an architecture unit in the spring with my fourth graders and found within a few minutes short videos on housing styles and a really neat one showing a group of kids building a geodesic dome out of rolled up newspaper. I checked out the TED site and there were many interesting videos. I got a little sucked in and ended up wathing all of Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford two years ago. Interesting! Because I teach third and fourth graders, I probably wouldn't use TED that much, because the video topics are much higher level. I might have my students access teacher Tube for videos on their current research unit. I would never give them free access to You Tube, for obvious reasons. There are awesome videos on it, but also many inappropriate ones.

Thing 21: Twitter

2010-01-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

I have to say that this is one tool that I'm just not too keen on using either in my classroom, or personally. When I clicked on the Twitter search tool, I put in the name of my city, Byron Center. I did get some information on current events and stuff with the schools, but also got weird posts from someone sitting at the bar in Monelli's and another riddled with profanity from a teenager whose parents are moving and she has to attend Byron Center High School and obviously doesn't want to move. I felt like I was spying on people's lives and it was a bit creepy! Of course, if people didn't want others knowing their business, they wouldn't sign up for Twitter! I did notice that there were a lot of tweets from the high school and various clubs on upcoming events or up-to-the-minute details on meets as they were unfolding. That would be kind of neat to get for people who are interested. I don't think I'd use it with my students simply because it's so unfiltered and you don't know what you are going to find. This is one that I probably should spend some time researching articles on the internet that share how other teachers are using Twitter in their classrooms. I have to say, this is one of the only Web 2.0 tools that I really didn't get into.

Thing 20: Bookmarking with De.licio.us

2010-01-02T16:50:00.000-08:00

Here's the link to my bookmarks:

http://delicious.com/tracey.hummer

Sorry, you can tell that I'm not back in school mode yet because all of my links are weight loss or Girl Scout ones! I really wish that thing 20 had been bumped up to think 2 or 3. There are so many websites throughout the 23 things that I bookmarked. I'll have to fiddle with delicious and figure out how to import all of them into the program. I can definately see this site helping my productivity a ton. Not only will it be easier for me to access the sites I need, but it will be so much easier to use with my students. I often have my third graders do research and gather a list of specific web sites that I would like them to use. My fear is not that they will get into anything inappropriate, but that they will waste lots of time on useless sites that won't help them find what they are looking for. I use the site Filamentality a lot to create hotlists of hyperlinks for students. It works well, but it's a pain initially when they go to the site because of the absolutely huge URL. For anyone who's ever created a hotlist on Filamentality, you know that the web address is often something like this: www. kn.pacbell.filamentality/weblist and on even more! What always happens is that the students goof up one of the 40 characters and then get totally frustrated and I run around and type it in for them. The next time we visit the lab, it's much easier becaue they all have it bookmarked, but whew! That first time is awful and stressful! It will be much easier to have them just go to my delicious bookmarks. Wonderful!

Thing 19: Intro. to Social Bookmarking

2010-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

What a great idea that someone had! I can't count the number of times that I've been at home and want to get back to a bookmarked website, but the bookmark was made at school. I also have a mess of over a hundred bookmarks that are totally unorganized or tagged, so I always have to search the whole list to find what I'm looking for. Also, my district reimages computers every summer and wipes out all of our bookmarks. Ugh! I found that out the hard way last year. It will definately be a time saver, but I'm wondering if I can also use this with students. It would be great to do some initial searching for good sources for a research project and then have them be able to access those bookmarks for their research. I was pretty excited about it until I read the 13 tips article. Yikes! I didn't realize that tagging bookmarks can be such a hassle, but it totally makes sense. Opensource versus open source versus open-source. I can see how different people can tag the same sites totally differently. I'm sure I'll run into those issues at some point, but I'm not as interested at this point about the social aspect of delicious, but just being able to organize my bookmarks and being able to access them from any computer. As soon as I get more "into" using the site, I will try to become more familiar with searching the most common tags that other people use for certain sites and can also edit and switch the tags that I've set. I thought it was funny that the article mentioned to be careful of what you tag sites and not to tag a site on your competitor's products "enemies." I can only imagine the trouble that some people have gotten into choosing inappropriate tags for their bookmarks!

Thing 18: Building your personal learning network

2010-01-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

I think I get the gist of Ning and what social networking is. I could see it being especially helpful for my teaching partner and I. We teach elementary gifted and talented classes and there are very few G/T programs left in our county. When we are faces with different issues and decisions that will impact our program, we really don't have anyone else to go to to bounce ideas off of but each other. It would be helpful to try to locate a G/T personal learning network that we could connect with. I also think it would be helpful to find one for the parents of the students in our program. People often think that gifted students are always high achieving teacher pleasers who do well in school. Some do, but there are also others who learn much different, have social-emotional issues common with gifted kids, or have issues fitting in with their peers. I'm sure my parents would love to have a forum for ideas. The issue with personal learning networks that makes me unsure of them is how do you know that the advice or info. you are getting from others in the network is valid? Are there people out there that would purposely post incorrect information? I'm assuming that others on the network would catch and point out inaccuracies, but it makes me a little leery of them. The other drawback is that I'm a person that really does better face-to-face when someone is explaining or talking me through something. If I just wanted sources or opinions on something, a PLN would be great, but on one of the educational ones I was looking at, people gave a lot of tips and advice on technical issues. Unless someone shows me how to do something, I have a hard time. Walking me through it in a written format is often tough for me. Sorry, I'm a visual learner!

Thing 17: More Web 2.0 winners

2010-01-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

These were fun to check out! The list was so huge that I stuck with the winners list. All of the education ones were pretty dry or focused mainly on foreign languages, so I ended up just randomly searching in all categories. My favorite was definately Upcoming. What an awesome site. You can search any date in GR and get info. in certain categories like museums or music or get anything from musical venues to storytime for toddlers at Barnes and Noble at Rivertown. You can create an event calendar and touch base with friends who have created a login on the site and calendar to let you know that you will be attending that event. You can also purchase tickets on the site. Cocktail maker was fun for party planning and Health Revolution is a fantastic site for people like me who swear they are going to drop pounds this year. Unlike other health sites, this one is really comprehensive. You can search health and medical issues, set up a fitness plan, get healty recipes, and track your dieting progress all on one site. Maybe this will be my motivation this year! I feel like I need about another 8 hours to check out all of the sites on the winner list.

Thing 16: Teach Digital

2010-01-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

Wow! Lots to think about. Didn't care for the last video, but the first two were excellent. I really enjoyed Ken Robinson's talk on creativity. I have to admit, when I first saw that it was 20 minutes long, my reaction was ugh! but it was very well done, and it didn't hurt that he has a great sense of humor! I felt that after viewing both videos, that to best encourage potential in all students is an incredibly hard balancing act for teachers. I see my kids and their friends growing up with so much technology, that texting, podcasting, and face book and Twitter are all just a part of their lives. I imagine that children today who grow up to be teachers won't even need to think about integrating technology. It will be such a natural way of communicating that they will mostly need to concentrate on what to communicate and not the how. Myself and my colleagues struggle because we are frantically trying to squeeze in the time to learn the newest technology while still trying to stay on top of what we are mandated to teach. This class is a testiment to that for me. I've struggled with fitting in learning about Web 2.0 while lesson planning, correcting papers, and trying to fit in time to sleep and talk to my kids! I totally get that some technology needs to be integrated to meet students needs and prepare them for the future, but the first video created by college students seemed to be too far one way. If we (teachers) integrate all types of technology all the time and no traditional lecture or written tasks, aren't we just creating students who can collaborate and create online, but have a hard time in the future work place getting along and collaborating with live people? Like I said, it's a balancing act. I do feel that the strong message that came out in both videos was that teachers need to be more open to letting students create and present what they've learned in a variety of ways that build on their strengths instead of just forcing certain products all the time.

Thing 15: Using Podcasts in the Classroom

2009-12-31T10:31:00.000-08:00

I think that podcasts are a great tool, but just like everything else, they have a place. First of all, I thought that the video was great because althought I had heard of podcasts and knew what they were, my question was always, "Where do you search for them?" I also didn't realize that you have to have a podcast catcher downloaded onto your computer. I loved podcast alley, but unfortunately, my school laptop that I am working right now is set up so that I am blocked from downloading anything unless the tech. dept. does it, so I wasn't able to listen to any of those podcasts. For some reason, I was able to listen to the ones on the education podcast list by David Warlick. I loved some like the bedtime stories one and there was also an awesome science one, but some I couldn't see using. Students would love to hear someone else reading a story to them now and then and also some subjects can be explained in words, but many of the podcasts that I skimmed through were audio only with no video. So many of my students are visual learners, that that's why I say that podcasts have a place and can really enhance teaching. However, in many areas, I don't think that they can take the place of a good teachers who shows, explains, models, and most importantly, conveys enthusiasm about a subject area. I do think podcasts are wonderful for the high school level, particularly with students who are absent or need to listen to a lecture just one more time to understand the material. In the Thing 14 video, there was an example of a science teacher in Minnesota who did test review podcasts for the students to use the night before a test. What a great idea!

Thing 14: Learn About Podcasting

2009-12-31T09:55:00.000-08:00

I skimmed through many of the podcasts and was most interested in the student generated ones. I think that creating a podcast would be such a wonderful motivator for students and a cool end product that could be shared with others. Some were good, and as I expected, many of the high school ones were drier just because of the level of information, but hands down, the one that I thought was just exceptional was the radio Willow one from Nebraska. I'm glad that in the video, the woman from RESA explained that they have been doing podcasts for a long time. It really shows. I can't believe how professional-sounding the kids are, even at the first grade level! First of all, I can easily see using their podcasts in my classroom. They have all elementary grade levels represented and a huge variety of topics, both core subjects and beyond such as health and artists. I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into creating such a high quality podcast with such young children. I really enjoyed one about famous artists by first graders. They had to have spent a couple of weeks exploring various media, then researching famous artist, writing a script, rehearsing, and then recording the final product. The final podcast is very good and I'll bet that the students are really excited and can't wait for mom and dad and their freinds to hear it. What a super motivator for a unit that makes the students work really hard. I'll bet that they don't even realize all of the hard work because they are having so much fun creating their own "radio program." The episodes also contain a large amount of information, so they are really useful to other teachers to use in their classrooms. I would love to use the Willow podcasts to not only teach my students further information about various topics, but also to inspire them to want to create a podcast in our own classroom.

Thing 13: Sharing your Vision

2009-12-30T13:01:00.001-08:00

I had a lot of fun with this "thing?" I checked out all of the sites, but I really like Slideshare and Slide. It's amazing how many different types of presentations are on Slideshare, ones that I could use in school such as ones on the writing process or various science things like the water cycle as well as cool fun sites. My daughter loved checking out all of the sites on horses and it was neat that they have awards and that viewers can vote on their favorites. I chose Slide to create my own slideshow and again, my 8-year-old daughter had a hand in it. I didn't think the two other slideshow creation sites were as user friendly. Slide had neat grahics and background choices and I like that you can also instantly add your completed show to facebook or other locations. I lead a girl scout troop and I created one that shows images from three different events from this fall. It was super easy and fun to create. It would be neat in school to use Slide to have the students create personal biograhy projects or even presentations on a research topic. I noticed on other participant's blogs that they were able to actually post their completed slideshows. I couldn't figure out how to do that, but here is the web address to view my completed Girl Scout slide show.

http://www.slide.com/r/VN8-j6WHwD-dgU6is0V0UkF6iw1d_x8X?previous_view=mscd_embedded_url&view=original

Thing 12: Productivity Anywhere

2009-12-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

The site that I reviewed and played around with was Remember the Milk. I'm such a huge list person both in my school career and at home, that I thought I'd really get into this site. Yuck basically sums up my thoughts on this site. I had no problem setting up my site and registering for free, but I thought it was very cumbersome to use. First, you have to put in your task. Then you have to categorize it as personal or work. Then you set the date when it's due. Then you set the priority level for each. Yikes! It would take me so long to do a simple to do list that it would drive me crazy! I'm not enough of a "techie" to get into this site. The feature that I do think is neat is the fact that you can set it up so that reminders get IMed to you or sent to your Blackberry. My husband is in sales and lives and breathes with his Blackberry for business, so I can see him totally getting into this tool. For me, I think I'll stick with my PDA. I know it's probably considered a dinosaur now, but it works for me! I think I'll check out some of the other sites to see if one of them would be more helpful.

Thing 11: Online Productivity Apps

2009-12-29T16:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, I do think that Microsoft should be worried! I can already see many uses for Google docs. My teaching partner and I collaboratively do a newsletter to all of the parents of students in our program each month. It's always a pain because one of us works on it first and either saves it to our school server or e-mails it to the other and we have to be careful that the version that we e-mail out to parents is indeed the final version with all of the edits. By uploading it to Google documents, we can both work on it from home or school. I can also see doing this with my monthly newsletter that I do for my girl scout troop. Before I send it to parents, I always print it out for my co-leader and she does edits in pencil and gives it back to me to revise. This will be much easier! I'm also excited because I just bought a netbook and was bummed that I don't have Office on it and could'nt create any documents. I just tried creating one in Google documents and it works great. I'd heard of it before, but had no idea what Google docs really was. I'm glad I do now.

Thing 10: Create a Wiki

2009-12-29T16:32:00.000-08:00

I used Wiki Spaces to create my wiki and it was very easy not only to post to a page, but it was also easy to customize the look and feel of my wiki and give it a more attractive color scheme and a neat graphic on the edge that makes it look likes it's in a spiral notebook. I can easily see setting up a wiki and inviting the parents in my gifted and talented program to take part in postings and discussions. I could post book reviews of good reads on gifted issues and links to ppoint presentations I've created on issues with gifted students and differentiation in the classroom for gifted students. I really like the discussion feature and think that it would be a great place for parents to get feedback from other parents of gifted students. We used to have an active parent group for our program and guest speakers, but with parents being busier these days and budgets cut back to nothing, all of that has gone by the wayside. A wiki would be a great way for parents to connect and use each other as valuable resources.

Thing 9-Wikis

2009-12-28T19:58:00.000-08:00

First of all, let me say that I'm glad to finally know where the word wiki came from! I'd heard about them and always wondered where that strange word came from and now I know. The first of the three wikis that I checked out was the one that I'm most familiar with, Wikipedia. I have used it a lot with students for basic research and knew that it sometimes can be questionable as far as accuracy, but I checked it out specifically for recent changes to see just how quickly and what types of things are changed on the site. It was interesting. Of the last fifty changes, many were picky little grammer things. There were little bits of information added here and there, but I was surprised at how many items were deleted all together out of articles. I think it's still a good basic sourch, but I now have more concerns about accuracy when I see that some people delete information on the site and change things often. The second wiki that I thought was really cool was the city of Rochester's community guide. What a cool idea! The local government added the basics about the community, but then other community members added information on sites of interest and history. What a cool way to pool everyone's ideas about the community! The last one was the links to the many wikis created by Ms. Davis' high school students. The best I thought was the Web 2.0 project where students created definitions and links to sites with information on podcasts, RSS feeds, etc. Although it is really cool that the students took it upon themselves to develop their own wikis with review guides and the study hall one with all kinds of links to information about various classes, the fact that any student can add to it makes me a little leery. Some students I'm sure add legitimately helpful and accurate information, but I'm sure that there are also ones out there that add false and goofy files just to be jerks and mess up other students. I totally agree with the slideshows on wikis that the fact that anyone can add to them and edit is both a blessing and a curse. I am a teacher in a gifted and talented program and we used to have guest speakers on various topics relating to gifted ed., but people are so busy, that turnout to these meetings was often low and we stopped doing them. Creating a gifted ed. wiki and asking the parents of our students to share their stories, expertise, and links to information would be fantastic!

Thing 6: Copywrite

2009-12-27T06:47:00.000-08:00

Sorry! I created this post long ago, but must not have hit 'Publish.' I was surprised when I looked at my record of posts on my blog that Thing 6 was missing! Some of the copywright information wasn't new to me, but all of the fair use info. definately was and was interesting. The only area of copywrite that stresses me out in my teaching is the use of music. Students in our gifted program create mini "movies" on a certain research topic using Photo Story 3 and they also create mini time capsules of their lives using Moviemaker. For both projects, the students add background tracks of music. My teaching partner and I have both stressed out when we have students add the music because of copywrite issues. We've gone to sites like www.freeplaymusic.com as well as purchased public domain music CDs at Best Buy, but sometimes, students want a specific track of music for their background. For example, I recently had students create a claymation project on the life of Babe Ruth. They wanted "Take me out to the Ball Game" running in the background. I told them that they couldn't because of copywrite, but now that I read the guidelines, I'm thinking that they could have. The project was created for educational purposes, we were only using a small portion of the song and the project was only for those three students who created it. It wasn't going to be distributed or posted on the web. Unless I'm misinterpreting the guidelines, I think I've been way too strict and paranoid about using music. Let's hopy I'm accurate in my interpretation, because I am planning on not being as strict with students on future projects. I can totally see why my boys thought that a baseball song would be perfect for their project and I'm kind of sad that I didn't let them use it now.

Thing 8: Locating RSS Feeds

2009-12-27T05:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, I should have read the description of Thing 8 before I blogged on Thing 7! Oh well. The RSS thing is very cool, but I was so frustrated because I was having a hard time searching in Google News for exactly what topics I wanted info. on and ended up searching back in the Thing 2 list of blogs and many of those do not have links to RSS feeds. My favorite tool for locating feeds was definately the link to the EduBlog awards. I love Kathy Schrock's website and when I went to it and tried to add an RSS feed for Thing 7, I couldn't find one on her site. Lo and behold, she does have one relating just to technology and it was a runner-up for an Edublog award. Awesome! I added that one to my feeds as well as the Free Technology one, which was the top award winner. I wasn't as happy with Technorati, simply because it covered much more than education topics and I noticed that a lot of the blogs when I searched were gossipy ones related to Hollywood and stars. I did, however, like their top 100 blogs list. I find that now when I'm searching for feeds, it's helpful that Google Reader lists how many people subscribe to that site and how many average posts are put on it per week. I ended up going back and removing a couple of my feeds that had very low subscribers or too many posts per week. I don't have the time to read ones that have 10 or more posts per week and low subscriber numbers tells me that the site isn't that good. I can't wait to check my account tomorrow and see what posts have been added. What a time saver for me! I don't have time to constantly go and check my favorite sites, but visiting Google Reader periodically is no problem.

Thing 7: RSS Feeds

2009-12-27T05:38:00.000-08:00

This exercise I had fun with! I already had kind of an idea of what RSS feeds were, but I never took the time to actually figure out how to set them up and manage them and I'd never heard of Google Reader or Google News. The tutorial video walking me through step by step how to search and add links was great! I actually went back to the blog list from Thing 2 and subscribed to some of those blogs that I thought were really interesting. I was frustrated when some of them did not feature an RSS link. I quickly subscribed to two personal sites on weight and fitness (yes, I like everyone else on the planet have a New Year's resolution to drop some weight!), one on gifted education and a final one on Web 2.0 tool ideas to use in the classroom. I need to play around with Google News a little more. I tried to search a topic and then specifically for a blog. I sometimes got good hits, but more often than not, got weird ones or couldn't find any at all. Like I said, I'll have to play around with it a little more. I'm wondering if there is a site out there with a list of recommended RSS feeds for different subject areas. I'll have to search.

Thing 4-Photo Sharing

2009-12-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

What a cool site Picasa is! I feel like a dinosaur when it comes to photo sharing. I'm so used to the "old way" of doing photos and I have to admit that right now, my digital camera has about 350 photos on it that I haven't downloaded or done anything with. Let's hope I don't lose the camera! Picasa would be a great site to access both for my personal photos as well as a resource to use in my teaching. With Christmas being right around the corner, I know of a lot of teachers, myself included, talking about Christmas in different countries. How cool to be able to use the photo tags to search for pictures from certain countries and then to see where they are geographically on a map is even cooler! It would be a neat site to use to have the students do projects involving the ancestry of their families and then pull in pictures from their family's country of origin and even add some of their own.

Thing 3-The 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners

2009-11-21T17:56:00.001-08:00

The easiest of the three habits for me is probably Habit 1: Beginning with the End in mind. When I begin a project or lesson, I always have in my mind my goal, what I want to create or achieve. I have a hard time breaking down projects into steps that I have to achieve. I'm always anxious to get going and get to the final product. That's why when I have to follow directions to complete a lesson or project, I always have to see a rubric breaking down what the final product should look like or a diagram showing me what my goal is. I think that this habit is the easiest for me because I always have so many balls in the air, that if I broke every project and task down into subtasks instead of focusing instead on the final goal, I'd probably drive myself crazy. The hardest of the habits for me is Habit 3: Viewing problems as challenges. I tend to freak out when something doesn't go as planned and need to begin viewing tackling challenges as learning experiences, which they are. I eventually do, but that doesn't stop me from initially panicking. I think that I do this because I try to tackle too much at once and have too many projects going at once. Multi-tasking can be a good thing, but sometimes simplifying your life is better!

23 Things-The First Thing Con.

2009-11-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

I can't believe how much time I just took searching through other people's educational blogs! I have known for a while what blogs are, but I guess I thought that they were just sort of online diaries. I know a few stay-at-home moms in my neighborhood who have them and use them to chronicle their kids' day-to-day activities to share with their familiy members who live out-of-town. I've never searched for educational ones and I found some fantastic ones! Some were great and others were definitely not so good. In my opinion, here are common themes that I found in the "good" ones:

Information on the author: Is this person an expert in their field? Do they currently work with students and if so, do they teach a grade that is comparable to mine so that the information provided is relevant to me.
Links to additional information: Many authors gave reflections on how they felt for example about using The Daily Cafe language arts techniques in their classroom and how they incorporated them. They might then have links on the web for further information on that topic for me to read.
Student Projects: The best sites for me were the ones that contained links to actual student projects. There are many educational blogs out there on Web 2.0 tools that have great links to completed student projects. This is invaluable to me, because even if someone has a great description of a student project, it always helps me to see a completed one.
Archives or a search button: Great for searching for particular topics. I found a blog with fantastic information about Web 2.0 integration in student projects. Recent entries were all about Twitter. I am more interested in Teacher Tube. When I searched, I found 5 entries on Teacher Tube in the archives with further links to information and student project examples.
Jazzy images and text formatting: Hey, I'm only human! If a site looks bright and colorful and fun, I'm much more apt to take a minute to read what the person has to say because it shows me that they put more effort in putting their blog together.

I think that a blog could help to enhance my district's website by giving parents and other teachers more current and class-specific information instead of just district-wide information. It's also an easy way to publish student material. How cool would it be to have teachers subscribe to and follow each other's blogs! For example, I'm always a little frustrated when my students are suddenly gone from class because they need to add an extra band practice for a concert. The band teachers don't always remember to let us know and here and there, I will suddenly be missing 6 students from class. If the band teacher had an up-to-date blog that I subscribed to, I could get a blog entry with information on the extra practice with a brief video posting of the students from the last practice showing their hard work before the concert. How cool!

I definitely see Web 2.0 tools as playing a large role in 21st century teaching, especially in the areas of research and cooperative learning and project creation. The Blogs in Plain English video I think did a good job of showing how different news is created and reported on today. Students used to research topics using books, reference materials and the internet within the confines of their school day. Web 2.0 tools allow students to access the most up-to-date information, connect with primary sources themselves via social networking tools, and collaboratively create projects outside of the classroom day. In the five schools I've taught in, each has had posted their school mission statement. In almost all of them, they include that they want students to become "lifelong learners." I think that Web 2.0 tools help to foster this.

23 Things-The First Thing

2009-11-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

I am excited to learn about the world of Web 2.0. I thought that I was using technology a lot in recent years, but have found that I basically use technology for research, project creation, and presentation. I would like to use the collaborative tools of Wikis and social bookmarking. I think that both would be beneficial to my program.