This course was great! It was just what I needed. Where do I go from here – I hope to incorporate many of these tools into my class and my school. Where to start? Hmmm, that is what I am struggling with. I know where I want to end up. I would like to create an alternative to Facebook at the High School, so that we , the faculty, can communicate with our students and not feel like we are coming too close to their world socially.
I will look at alternatives to achieve that goal. For now, I think I will take three of these “Things” and try to incorporate them into a professional development for my faculty – similar to how it was done here. If I could come close to creating the learning environment that was created here, I know I will have served my faculty well.
I hope I can continue to find course like this in the future – because I learned and practiced immediately so much.
I joined Classroom 2.o last year, but have never really used it. I spent a great deal of time with it, mainly exploring the forums. There was so much useful information there. I also joined two groups – Professional Development and Moodle. Reading the forums, I see that many have the same struggle as I – what is the best environment for a classroom resource, and what is the best tool for a school wide teacher resource.
I have bookmarked this in my delicious group and will make sure I look at it at least once or twice a week – so much information. I am not sure if I could actually start my own Ning social network, but that is the way I would like to go for our high school.
I think this tool can be very valuable, but it was not the easiest to use. I think I need more time to work with it. (Although I spent most of one day fooling with it).
I would recommend this tool to teachers to use in research projects or even when covering a certain module in their classroom (i.e. AP history).
I think the most important lesson learned is to select which tool you are going to use to aggregate your information and stick to one. As of now I have Google reader, delicious, and pageflake, as well as good ol bookmarks.
I have used google docs this past year. I am excited that we have created our own domain at our high school, with Google Apps. The three ideas I have for classroom use:
1. This we used all last year in our journalism class. The students created (or uploaded) their writing piece and shared it with their editors. The editors would make revisions and let the reporters know so that they could look at the latest document and finalize it based on the editors comments.
2. I have used it with the other technology specialists in the district in coming up with teaching resources to have a digital bootcamp this summer. We each could add what we felt was needed – goodbye to emailing docs back and forth!!!!
3. I think it will be great for our students to work on group presentations together. There is a lot of that type of work done at our school, and often it requires that we create a “shared” folder so students can put the latest version there. How nice it will be to have it all online!!
We are anticipating bringing our students into our apps community within the first couple of weeks of school. How wonderful this will be to be able to share and communicate without a lot of software version conflicts!
I found the googledocs reference document to be extremely useful. I plan to give this to my faculty to use.
I looked for videos that will help our staff with the new tablets that we are introducing next week. This included One Note as well as general overview of the tablet. I searched Teacher Tube for lesson plans so that the students can make use of them to be actively engaged. I found a couple, but not a lot, and nothing that I would jump up and down with excitement.
I did find a series of SMARTboard videos that were very helpful, as well as engaging. Here is an example of one:
Since I have created podcasts on a Mac with Garageband, I thought I would try the tools that are available on a PC. I recorded the podcast using Vacaroo and used iTunes to convert it to a MP3 file. I then uploaded it to Gcast and have embedded it below:
I would normally add music in the beginning. I would like to incorporate a weekly podcast on our high school student newspaper
I explored most of the educational technology and high school student podcasts. I subscribed to a few right then. My favorite is the “Teachers Connecting” podcast and the “SoundOff” from Hemlock Public School. I think the SoundOff idea is worth “stealing” and I plan to bring it to our WSPN editors to see if we could implement something similar on our online newspaper.
Viewing the PodGrunt video led me to a site, pixelcorps.tv where I subscribed to a couple of podcasts and tagged the site in my delicious reader. The” videogrunt” and “This Week In Media” will be very useful for my Journaliam class.
I think creating podcasts in the classroom is very beneficial and so easy with Garageband. At the high school, I have introduced and help create several podcast projects; Creating a Spanish talk show about movies, interviews of people in our town to give a historical personal account of certain periods of history (historyproject) and our own “This I Believe” series for Freshman English. In each of these projects, the students are very engaged.
Very Interesting – I am so glad to have been introduced to this site. I immediately put it in my delicious tags, and after spending time browsing the site, sent the link to my Englsih department. I can see so much potential with this in the clasroom.
I especially liked the 50 Book Challenge where people track their books over the course of a year. It gives them an opportunity to give a “book report” and others can comment on their thoughts about that book. I think this would be a huge motivator for students.
I have been acquainted with del.ic.ious over the past two years, but as with many Web 2.0 tools, I have not had the time to make it part of my routine efficiency tools. I am thankful that I had the time to do it this summer. I have made a note to self to explore diigo since Shelly described it as “del.ic.ious on steriods”. That is quite an inviting description.
I networked with two of my counter parts in my school district as well as with Shelly.
I will use this tool in my class to help students with research. I have just finished another online class where someone shared that he was able to get wonderful resources fast by searching his delicious account. I had never thought of that, but now I see the value.
Here are my delicious links so far. I will import my bookmarks over a break – or maybe one at a time.
My first exposure to this tool, Xtranormal, was watching videos that others had done. I was immediately turned off to student use, by the language in the comments section of already made movies. I do see that they have just announced that they will try to make an educational version, where this sort of viewing could be blocked. As it stands now, I would need to supervise closely when the students accessed the site.
I created a movie, by reading the forums and jumping in. Many people saw this as a GREAT educational tool, I am not so convinced. The one area where I thought it might be fun would be to create a foreign language script. Although the voices are not great, it would give the students a way to try out a dialoge.
You can see my quick attempt at an introduction to our Summer Boot Camp. I played around with the expressions as well as with using different voices. Sometimes I had to render it twice to have my changes take effect.
