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.

Thing #17 Library Thing

It's so funny that this website showed up today. I have been reading teen lit all summer and have been writing in a journal my reviews. I was thinking that I should set up a web site where I could organize all of this information but wasn't sure how and even if I wanted to spend that time on the project. Perusing the Library Thing website made me see the value and the fascination with my lists and the recommendation lists of books that would be generated. Still not sure if I will take the time right now to do it. I also have quite a thing going at Amazon with my wish lists and recommendation lists et al. If there is one thing that I am discovering about all of this social media research it is that there are numerous ways to organize your web life that intertwines with your "real" life and that it can get mighty time consuming! I do think that the site is cool though and I loved the fact that I can see at a glance all of the media "goings on" in the Bay Area. I changed my search from San Francisco to Walnut Creek so this side of the Bay would be highlighted. Glad to see there are still quite a few independent booksellers around the Bay Area.
I know that I will revisit this site and that I will be using it sometime in the future. I just have a thing for books and libraries :-)

Thing #15 Online Productivity Tools

I was very interested in all three sites highlighted in this entry because I see our students heading in this direction next year at the very least. We need to simplify the school/home connection for collaborative work and so far I have only experimented with schoollop's capabilities which even in their supposed simplicity were difficult to maneuver for some 6th grade students. Next year we will be adding the OpenOffice to the online word processing tools for kids so I downloaded it on my home computer in the hopes that I will have some time to play around. We'll see. I haven't used the Google doc with my students yet but it seems fairly straightforward and their are hundreds of interesting templates which always makes life easier from a teacher-perspective! I do think that this is definitely the way of the future with online communication and tools getting easier and easier to use and more and more creative. I am still trying to send a Zoho doc to my blog. It won't recognize the blog address for some reason.

Thing #16 More Wiki Ideas

Posted to the cl2.0 wiki sandbox about my new favorite free new music site: opsound.org.

I also have now generated way too many wiki ideas for using this year with my students. Looking around the links posted I was thinking about the possibility of connecting with students across the country or internationally. In past years my students have communicated with pen pals (the old fashioned snail-mail way!) and continued with their friendships via their personal emails. I am now thinking how cool it would be to actually work on a project with kids from NY for example. I am also thinking that we could set up a Wiki with our writing and have a specific audience in a couple different schools around the US or possibly even internationally. I also think that I might set up our class journal in either a blog setting or wiki depending on how interactive we'd like it to be. Like all ideas, there are many pieces that I do not know or understand how to make it so, but I love to dream in big pictures! I think once we get started this year we will begin to see the possibilities grow exponentially.

Thing #14 Wikis

I think that starting a Wiki with the 6th grade core team might be a productive way for us teachers to share our materials, lessons, and links. Right now we send emails with attachments or pass around hard copies to each other at planning meetings. Wouldn't it be great to know that the resources were all in one place AND that we could make adjustments and additions to the work to make it better in a cumulative effort? We might save a lot of time and produce some dynamite materials.

I would also like to try wikis with my kids this year. Barbara had success with scientist projects this year and I like the idea that they can work on the wikis both at home and in school. Another point to consider is that our pedagogy will be changing a lot this year with the addition of COWs in our classrooms; I want to have continuous use of the computers within a workshop atmosphere. Wikis seem like a first step since not all students have access to a computer at the same time and will have to be working collaboratively. We could also use them for our current events each week and post multiple articles, perspectives and responses. And of course for writing-opportunities are numerous. THis may be an easy first step for our team to consider as we implement technology and the new social network learning into our curriculums.

Thing #12 Tags and Del.ici.ous

Using the Delicious website came just in time. I was trying to decide what to do with all of the bookmarks on my computer and how to organize them in a more productive way. Presently I have them in folders and don't access them as often as I now will after adding the tags to the sites. I created a Delicious site and even checked out Diig to compare the two. The only difference I could see was that Diig organizes pictures and videos separately when you save them. It also seems to have a way to notate text but I didn't spend enough time figuring that one out. Most of the sites I save are web sites and not articles and text (at this point anyway). I have tagged all of the blogs that I've discovered so far in this project and I am hoping to have time this summer to go through my folders and clean up my saved sites on my desktop. I am discovering that so much is being developed simultaneously and that each social media organizational site keeps getting better so I don't want to take too much time redoing something that is still in development.

THing #11 Web 2.0 Awards

This was one of my favorite "things" so far! Travel IQ game was extremely quick and an interesting way to check my basic knowledge of famous travel places and iconic structures from around the world. Could be a nice ap for kids (if I ever get the iTouch grant $ from Chevron) The Classroom 2.0 site had many new blogs to check out. I joined the one for Goggle Aps. I also have an RSS for their webcasts which are quite frequent. I participated in one 2 years ago with another teacher and found it to be quite simple actually. We merely signed up, signed in and watched. I would like to find the time to participate in more of them but I am assuming that they also publish podcasts of all of them so I could take a look during my "free" time!

Ning is, in my opinion, one of the best sites around. I joined a couple of different ones throughout the last couple of years and continue to find interesting ideas from others in the teaching profession. Of course, the implications for our classrooms are huge (with the exception that students need to be 13 yrs. old which is a problem for 6th grade). I am a member of a couple of teachers' sites and am impressed with the blogging the students do about literature and writing. I am aware of the huge amounts of work that is required by the teachers to maintain and respond to the posts which is a huge issue surrounding this work. The English Ning is extremely helpful. I read blogs from the site and look for ideas and answers to my questions on a weekly basis. We also have a LA Ning from the district but I must admit I haven't checked it out in a while. And I couldn't get on the GRMS NIng which was kind of funny. I am curious who is posting and about what!

Web 2.0 Awards were fascinating to peruse since many of the awards from 2009 were given to sites and products that I have used or have heard of. I was amused by the StarDolls site where you can create paper dolls of sorts with famous people's faces and bodies and dress them up. Kind of like the new Barbie dolls or paper dolls but on line now. Users share their own collections of these dolls too. It's a new world :-)

Thing #10 Image Generators

These sites were interesting to play around on. I created a couple of online cards which was nice to discover and sent them along to a few friends. I also messed around with the the comic strips and word bubbles and thought of ways that students could get creative with their illustrations of even the definitions of words ie: finding pictures to enhance with words and phrases that would help them remember visually the meanings. Once again I could play for hours on these sites! I am also realizing that many students would rather use a kind of image generator than to have to do illustrations. I wonder sometimes which takes longer amounts of time!

Another site I discovered is the NYTimes Visualization Lab http://vizlab.nytimes.com/

Thing #8 Learn about RSS feeds

RSS feeds have made my life easier since I try to keep up with many sites and blogs on a daily basis. I guess like everything else, it is keeping my Reader list from becoming too long and large so that I don't just delete everything because I haven't had a chance to read it. During the summer I am catching up a bit, but during the school year I don't know how to manage it all. I would love help in this area. How do other teachers find the time to keep up with their learning/reading on line?

Thing #7 Social Media Revolution video-interesting facts!

Thing #6 FLickr fun, mashups and 3rd party sites

Multiple perspectives-shoes
Originally uploaded by buzzfuzzwuzz

Trying to think about ways to use the poster maker and other interesting mash sites. Maybe to add to the multiple perspectives focus that 6th grade core has been promoting. It's nice to have these tools but I do get confused with all of the webbing that occurs connecting this site with that site and granting access for this group or that group. Working with kids, it's a tricky and legal issue and I am not savvy enough to navigate it all yet. I'd like to talk about this more with my colleagues. I could definitely spend more time playing with the mashups and maps. I have already spent a few hours and am always amazed at how easily I become lost in the fun of playing with new tech sites. THank goodness it's summer and my time is freed up a bit!

Thing #5 Explore Flickr

Rickshaw Spiderman NYC
Originally uploaded by dedbeats

I'm heading to NYC in a couple of weeks to spend time with my family and friends. Maybe I'll see Rickshaw Spiderman while I am there :-)

I got this video from Flickr and downloaded it to my blog. I have realized that most of what I want to share is an easy click away whether it be photos, videos, or comments on other people's posts to Flickr. Might come in handy when I am embedding videos for my students since they do not have access to all video sites at school.

I played around a bit with the photo sites and created some albums and even sent a few. This also might provide a way to capture all of the class photos and video that the students use to create their own memory dvds. Last year I downloaded all of the pictures from files on my flashdrive. It would so much simplier if they could download the files from FLickr.

Thing #4 Create My Avitar