Ramblings et al

My overall experience has been phenomenal. I have become a complete convert to Web 2.0, a long way from the skeptic I was at the beginning. I can see the value in almost everything we worked on and have envisioned so many ways to use the tools with which I am now familiar. I still have concerns about the way kids read and how the internet is effecting that, as well as the loss of certain hands on, cut and paste/arts and crafts type creativity. But I suppose it’s all about balance between the old and the new!

The way the course was set up was great for me.  I was able to ease into and play with all of the different tools in my own time and way. I learned more than I would have with someone showing me how to do the work. This probably was why I was so hesitant learn about wikis and blogs, etc, it seemed like a way to avoid teaching but I have to say the students can benefit in more ways than just learning how to use the tools.  This class will be a major contributing factor in changing not only the way I deal with my curriculum but about how I handle my own life long learning.  I will be seriously checking out classes on line in future.

Thanks you for the wonderful class and the opportunity to open my world in order to open up my students’ world. This has been a trip well worth it!

I really feel like I have an amazing amount to learn. I checked out all of the stuff on Classroom 2.0 and found that I kept getting lost in the depths of information. Unbelievable how much there is to learn and how easy it is to access. I signed up for both Classroom 2.0 and Ning in Education and hope to have time to fiddle around with each. I also noticed that several of my colleagues are new members and plan to contact them as “friends” A.S.A.P. – maybe there is some psychological strength in numbers. I need all the support I can get with wading through some of this information.

I found that both Ning and Classroom 2.0 were very user friendly and loaded with stuff to browse. I perused a discussion about Smartboards which have in my classroom and have never used. So, hopefully I will able to find some great ideas for using the thing. I also looked at who and what other users where a part of and found a wealth topics that interested me. I must give kudos to Stephanie Bullock for her acumen in the use of technology. Her profile on Ning lead me to Global Green Schools which is a big issue for me. Scary that a person is just a building over and you never really know how many small things you have in common. This is great way to keep up with people of similar interests over great distances and small.

This is beginning to feel a little rambling, so I should walk away from the computer for a while. But suffice it to say that this was another interesting web tool that I had no idea existed and will continue learn about and from. AMAZING!

Very interesting concept and a super organizational tool. I love the idea of a “theme” page similar to what Will Richardson did. I think it would be an excellent place to put links and such for novel units, grammar units, etc. I also thought it might be a good place for the kids to do their own pages or maybe each class put together a page with things related to school, of course, but also other extracurricular activities that they are involved with like NYO, TopHat, music, dance, etc. This would have to be overseen but I think it would be fun.

I will admit at this point that I’m feeling overwhelmed with the shear number of tools available and am wondering how to fit one more thing in. I suppose this could be a link on my main page for each individual theme. Lots of stuff to ponder and work on.

Google Docs is a great place to work. I like it best for two reasons 1) the ability to share and 2) I don’t need MY laptop, a flash drive, etc. to work on documents. I can go home pull up Google Docs and get to work from my home laptop and then I can send the document to a colleague for review and editing. Wonderful, simple! A friend turned me onto this last year and I’m an addict. We used it primarily for working at home and sharing but we would also use the spreadsheet to list out “frequently called parents” -we all know about those! We put in kid name, phone numbers, parent names, reason for call. This may sound weird but it was a great resource when you needed a number for a student or wanted to know if the parents had been called about a particular issue before i.e. not doing homework, grades slipping. For students the filling out forms feature is really cool for getting information about them during the first days of school. I also love the idea of students being able to collaborate on projects without having to use a flash drive, email, or the server to store their work. They can easily share from home with little problem. This is a super tool! I will be using it far more frequently this year.

YouTube is one of the most, um, interesting places around the web.  There is truly some weird stuff out there.  Really makes you wonder about people, especially if you leave the filter off.  Just for fun I typed in the word weird and chose “weird animals”, well, I got some weird animals alright.  Then I just kind of fumbled through ( I’ve used YouTube before but only to check stuff out) and looked at everything from AP Top Stories and CNN to Buddhist.  Under the latter I came up with “how to meditate” by a lama/guy who sounded like Rocky to a monk speaking Vietnamese and music for meditating. 

Lots of “how to” out there, many of which will go unmentioned since I was unfiltered!  Good thing very little shocks me!!  But how to eat an oyster was interesting in a why way, as was how to surf in a memory lane kinda way, but how to use a SMARTboard – ouch!!!!  Oh, and the guy that wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony by creating “how to play the guitar – the Eagles, Hotel California guitar solo,” another ouch!!  Overall, not a bad experience but in case you were interested in the oyster thing (and boy, I can see why you would be:)

Teacher tube was just okay. Part of my problem here was the buffing thing going on but I’m using an older laptop, so that could be my problem. I did find some neat ideas, for instance a virtual story summary of Sharon Draper’s YA novel “Tears of the Tiger”. This is a project I will try to use with my kids and some of their reading. Another idea is to use it to perform the short plays they write and now can act in without feeling silly in front of the class. I also thought this would be a great tool to do review pieces (me or the kids) for extra help that they could earn bonus points for viewing and answering a random question or two. Chef Grammar was a video I pulled up and he is just silly but gets his point across, perhaps I should try a personna?

Well, creating a podcast on Evoca couldn’t be easier. You just sit down and talk (don’t have any trouble there!) The only problem I had with the whole process was my own annoying voice. So, without further ado here’s my podcast titled Three Ideas for Podcasts.

I’m a fan already of podcasts. I am actually listening to “Car Talk” (silly and frivolous) as I work on this. I love the NPR podcast and started checking out the Grammar Girl stuff. I liked the Go Green Girl and The Migthy Mommy podcasts. I really think that I could use the Grammar Girl podcast for warm up exercises with my students, maybe a once a week listening activity during the first few minutes of class (6th graders are such crack listeners). I also think the the Go Green Girl site could be useful with the green initiative the we are working on at school, so another possibility for educating the kids. Other ideas I’m working on are working in podcasts with their choice assignments for independent reading or using them to let the students explain concepts or class content for a class page that absent students can listen/watch (they explain better at times than I do!) to find out what went on in class that day. As always, gotta play with this one!

I read a very interesting article from the NYTimes Online, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” by Motoko Rich which is the first article in a series that looks at “how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.” It argues both sides of the issue: the Internet is dumbing us down and if they’re reading then they’re reading, just in a different way. I personally don’t know what to think of the issue overall. Reading is good but what is good reading. I believe that the skill involved in reading a novel and the ability to focus on the author’s message, craft, attention or lack of attention to details is essential to so many areas of thinking and doing. However, the ability to located information quickly and accurately and draw conclusions from several source is cognitively challenging as well. Is there a middle ground?

The article highlights a teenager named Nadia and discusses how her mother tries to get her to read books but she is only interested in being online. Besides the normal networking/chat stuff she engages in, she also spends a great deal of time reading and contributing to works of fiction online through fanfiction.net and quizilla.com. Is she reading? Yes, just different in a different way.

Other students are mentioned and all seem to feel that online reading is superior. Zachary feels that the Internet offers more of a “conversation” and that “books are more one way.” XXXXX, who has been diagnosed with dyslexia, finds the Internet more accessible and engaging, he doesn’t like “all the boring details” of books (don’t read Moby Dick!). He has also been far more successful with online reading.

So, online reading? Godsend or product of the Devil? Maybe we should give it a try and then test the heck out the kids to see if they can cut in the real world which they also discuss in the article. But, will the real world more closely resemble what we dinosaurs grew up with (Ethan Fromme, Mill on the Floss, The Catcher in the Rye, etc –the truly uninteresting to the great) or what our students are creating behind our backs on collaborative websites?

Obviously, the article made me think – do you really have to “know how to read” to think? This could be a truly circular argument. <grin>

Um, LibraryThing, good!  I like.  I spent an hour just adding books for fun, a true English teacher and book lover.  I actually created a hyperlink thingy and spreadsheet back in the early 1990’s where I catalogued all of my classroom titles.  I went so far as to type in the names, authors, ISBN, publishers, publishing dates and, get this, went to the Library of Congress site for descriptions then cut and pasted.   Never again!  Simply go to LT!   I thought of a couple of personal uses for it, such as, cataloguing my class books (again), and a great way for my mother to keep track of what she has read (always forgetting if she read a title or not!)  In the class room I think I can use this tool with book groups and independent reading for keeping track of who read or is reading what!  I’ll play and figure it out!  But definitely a geek spot for me!

Del.icio.us is definitely an interesting tool. It is going to take to some time for me to “love it” like so many people seem too. I’m not much of a web surfer, I prefer the real thing. I’m sure playing around some more will help as with everything I do. (Change is bad, fear change! <grin>) Seriously, I can see many upsides to using this tool but learning to manage it will take me some time. For the time being I’ll work on marking sites for my use in my account and hopefully over time I can find stuff to add to the site for my students to use for projects and what have youl