Thing #21 My THoughts

Having the time to dive into this tutorial during the summer was ideal for me. There were sites and ideas to investigate and I needed some undivided time to just dream. Posting thoughts on my blog and creating a Delicious bookmarking site as well as a Reader for my RSS feeds and blogs will save time in the long run. (How I love getting organized!) They will be useful as the school year begins and our team starts brainstorming ways to continue to connect with technology as a tool for our students. With the arrival of our mobile classroom labs, we are already talking about how to integrate and use the social networking capabilities of our students to further their learning and make the best use of our valuable instructional time. And having time to take a look at Open Office and Zoho got me thinking about using them as collaboration tools along with google docs.  I feel that I need to get comfortable with Classroom 2.0 philosophy and tools so that I can provide the framework for my students to investigate with independence and responsibility and within a choice-embedded structure. This tutorial was a perfect beginning. Thank you!

Thing #7 Thoughts on Tech

After viewing the Social Networking Revolution video (see video in previous post) my first response was to be overwhelmed! The amount of information, the rate of speed at which it is being accessed and the skills that are needed to navigate successfully in this new world kind of blow my mind. I have been playing around for the last few days trying to figure out how all of this fits into my teaching today. I realized this year that with so much information on the web, many of the projects and assignments that I used to rely upon need some upgrading and expanding in order to keep their rigor. For example: the history projects that are part of the TCI curriculum are now all posted on line (another teacher's web site) and by googling "Egyptian Spy Journal" the entire assignment comes up complete with all of the information that students used in class to take their notes and create their spy journals. Sounds great except for the fact that plagiarism is extremely easy to succumb to all, the notes do not need to be taken in class anymore, and the project has become less rigorous. 
On the other hand, the tremendous amounts of time I used to spend searching for links and websites for my students has now shifted to the student. I love the fact that they are finding outstanding resources themselves and sharing it with the rest of our class. As a matter of fact, one of the additions to my history assessment this year was the reflection, "In what ways have you furthered your thinking?" whereby students had to provide evidence of their own independent searching and growth. This created lots of internet resources to share and it came from them!

Thing #9 Education Feeds

I was amazed by the incredible number of ways to find blogs! The BlogPulse was easy to use and I searched for numerous specifics like keeping reading journals and assessing conversations. There are so many teachers blogging about this things!  I tagged some blogs and added a few more to my Reader. WHat a resource. Same with Google Blog search. I am just beginning to realize all that google has to offer. They just keep adding to their list of resources and organizational tools. I haven't jumped in to many blog/ning conversations yet, merely looked for good ideas. I need to find a way to mark them-highlight-tag et al. Not sure of how to do that yet but it would be useful in the future. I still copy and paste ideas onto a doc for me to print and try out in my classroom. Old-fashioned. One step at a time. I need to take another look at Diig for text notation.
Another issue: some of the feeds are easily added to my Reader and others don't seem to work or have the capability. I need to figure that out. I don't like to receive RSS by email (which the way I've been doing it in the past) because it fills up my mailbox with tons of stuff that I end up deleting due to lack of time. I like the Reader better because I can read it as I have time and it stays nice and neat behind the links! All that unread stuff gets overwhelming on a daily basis :-) My biggest problem continues to be that I want to RSS feed everything! It sounds like the same problem that we have with our kids- how to decide what you need- and sometimes that means taking it all and comparing and contrasting until you find what works. There's that time element again...

THing#13 Creative Commons

The online comic book about copyright law was very creative. Lots of ideas for my graphic artists and graphic novel folks besides the important information within.  I liked the fact that you could animate it or download it as a book. Fun. Will definitely share that with my students. The Creative Commons website was extremely informative. I have so much to learn about creative license and copyright and so much to teach kids as they become more and more comfortable using the internet-generated ideas, pictures, media et al for their creative projects. One of the best pieces of advice I read was that as we develop media projects to use as we teach, we need to be modeling how to give credit to the sources. 


OpSounds.com is a very exciting discovery for me. I decided to download the new pieces daily as podcasts. Amazing new music and definitely useful for students to add to the work being that it is part of the creative commons network of artists who allow free access.

THing #18 YouTube and video

By far the greatest difference in my teaching this year as compared to 5 years ago when I left the classroom as a TSA was the impact and use of YouTube videos (pedagogically speaking). There was rarely a day that I did not use some type of visual component to my lessons or search YouTube sites to find additional links and info for my students. I was absolutely blown away by the additional resources available and cannot think of a time when I did not find something useful (along with lots of un-useful somethings as well :-)
I set up a blog precisely for videos early in the year because I found out that my students could not access YouTube at school and I wanted them to use some of what I had found. Embedding video I have discovered is quite easy to do and I actually feel better knowing that my 6th graders are only going to see what I had intended and not the kazilions of other videos that show up as a sidebar. It is also much safer to have them embedded on a safe site for viewing at home as well. I plan to fully develop this blog site next year and add to the videos already there.
And that brings me to another point that I have been pondering: How do we teach kids to be responsible users of technology and the internet and YouTube in particular? It is an amazing resource but is also full of material that is unsuitable for kids with just a click. Putting controls on sites is one thing but responsible, ethical use is another.
I love the archive site (archive.org) and want to create more (and let my students create more) presentations to share this year using clips, video and music. The site was easy to navigate via the search engine and I found lots of interesting videos but did not play around yet with creating. Another "to do" for this year.  Luckily I am bookmarking all of these wonderful sites on my Delicious site!

Thing#20 Ebooks and audio books

I was thrilled to find so many places to download free short stories and books. Not sure if I will find a lot of what I need in my curriculum but I will search for more when I have time. I did find a lot of classic novels and short stories which will be useful connections especially in historical contexts. I liked the ebook sites and google books and will continue to research this area since reading books online is definitely in the future for these students. I found a couple of books that I have read aloud (ie Fleischman's Seedfolks) that has sections online but not the entire text. This might be helpful for close text work instead of making individual copies for students to reread and mark up.
On another note, I received a Kindle for my birthday this year and am still trying to get used to it. It's interesting to think about what our students need and how these ebooks will work for them. For example: I find it difficult to mark the text, underline and notate which is something that students need to be able to do with novels but especially for non-fiction texts. This part is a bit cumbersome when reading a Kindle (at least for me). On the other hand, I love the fact that I can adjust the text size (!), have a well lit text, download a new book as soon as I finish with the old one, define unknown words with a click and carry it easily on a plane. We'll see what the future brings because one thing I know for sure is that ebooks are here to stay and will actually be a huge equalizing factor in the near future as budget cuts continue to cause problems for schools buying textbooks. I am surprised that it hasn't happened yet, but then again, those text book companies have a lot of  power especially in California.

Thing #19 Podcasts

I am a big fan of podcasts and have been  downloading programs from NPR like This American Life to listen to weekly on my iphone. I played around with a few podcasts for my students this year mostly in the lab, downloading news stories for them to listen to as they read them online but haven't gone much further with it yet. I am thinking about letting my students create some podcasts around their books and history units and after perusing the sites especially Libivox, have downloaded a bunch of short stories! It might be fun for students to make podcasts of the short stories they have written and to start a library which we could post on our class webpage (which I have to develop!) or on our blog (which I also have to develop!).  We might also partner up with our feeder schools and maybe read picture books or chapter books to younger students. Or poetry! It promises to be a busy year.