Thing #14

Wikis

I haven't yet decided how I feel about wikis, but do think they could have a big impact on the learning of our students as far as collaboration with others goes. I can see potential for their use for students to post their compositions in writing for peer revision and editing. I need to figure out how to use them a little better to see if their work would be able to be traced back to original form if editing and revisions are made.

I love how the students in Vicki Davis' blog took off with the "study hall" wiki idea. I am hoping that through my knowledge of these new Web 2.0 tools that I will see my students running with ideas as well.

My least favorite wiki was this one beacause I didn't find it visually appealing enough for me to want to explore it any further. I know I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I am guilty as charged. I think many people are the same way.

The kindergarten wiki brought hope to me, because I thought at first, "Oh my goodness, this is going to be a nightmare to try to implement in my class." If they can create one, so can 9 & 10 year olds!

I can see how a wiki could break the mold of traditional projects, so I truly hope to learn more about how to use them so that I can try them this year with my students. Oh, I also like the idea of having a class wiki because I feel like the students would have more ownership of it versus my class blog page. It's something for me to think about as I begin making my plans for the new school year.

Thing #13

Delicious is De-li-cious!

I literally spent probably two hours playing with my Delicious account. I LOVE the way I can tag different sites for easy retrieval later on. It was so easy to tag each site, find other sites within each tag, even adding my own bookmarks from my browser. Thankfully I didn't have too many bookmarks saved already because my netbook is fairly new because I will now ALWAYS use my Delicious account. I can't wait to get back to work so that I can add all of my bookmarks from my work computer and tag them. I think the best part of this will be the ease that my teammates and I will have with sharing websites with each other! I liked how the tags were shown in a cloud form to show the tags that were most abundant. It reminded me of the Wordle clouds that I can't wait to implement when we get back to school. In fact, I even found a great slide show by Tom Barrett of suggestions for uses of Wordle. I usually create a list of approved websites for my students, so how great this will be to be able to post it to my blog with my Delicious URL just for those tagged sites or for sites for research projects, writing resources, math tutorials, the list goes on...
*I checked the wiki to see if the site I had tagged with misd23things would show up, but it never did. I'm not sure why. I'll try again in a bit.

Thing #7a

Google Reader

I have been following the blog of John Schinker from Taste of Tech because of my love of travel, teaching, and working with people in different cultures. This particular post resonated with me. The following is a quote from his blog,
"Despite all of this, there are some surprises. Many of the people working in the townships have very nice cars, for example. Cars are a status symbol more important than housing. Those who have some wealth show it through the cars they park outside their meager dwellings. Cell phones are also very common. Electricity may be spotty (though it is generally available). Practically no one has a computer at home. But they all have cell phones. And most of the people are remarkably happy. In general, they’re more optimistic, cheerful, and hopeful than most North Americans I’ve been around."
That last sentence encourages me to work even harder to inspire others and to be a ray of optimism, cheer and hope.


I've been completing the class using a netbook with a 5x7 screen because my laptop fizzled out a few weeks ago. It's funny that while reading through the articles in my Google Reader, I learned something to help me out with my problem of struggling with reading the text on this tiny screen. This article taught me to use Ctrl + to increase the text size on websites. This is probably something I should have already known, but I've just never had the need for it in this age of gargantuan monitors.

Thing #12 note to self...wiki

created at Wordle

I had seen wordles before and was excited to be able to create my own! The coolest thing about this was that I was able to submit the URL for my blog for Wordle .net to pull words from to create my wordle. How great to be able to do that with websites that you may be using for webquests, to introduce new topics and content. I can also see this being used for new vocabulary and also for a simple assessment. Students could also use wordles to brainstorm during prewriting.

Thing #11

Trading cards can be made at Big Huge Labs. These would be fun to create in the beginning of the year for students to introduce themselves to their classmates and collect each others' cards. Also, students could create trading cards for their favorite book characters, historical figures, even places.



Our school's theme next year revolves around "Stars" so this image could be used on our class blog or on individual student blogs. It was created at Image Chef.





I created the "Inspire" word with Spell with Flickr. I had used this one before on my Myspace page. I think students would have fun with this.

Thing #10

Animoto and Flickr

I created this slide show as an example of how you could use Flickr and Animoto to create an "ABCs of..." video slideshow. I have used a paper and pencil version of using the alphabet for my students to tell me everything they have learned about a topic. How fun to be able to show me using photos from Flickr.




Welcome to Texas Sign, I 10 by Martin Labar
Sunset in Texas by swisscan
Battle of the Alamo Monument by adiffererntryan
Dallas, Texas by ragingwire
Big Tex, Texas State Fair by StevenM_61
Bluebonnet Field by StevenM_61
Armadillo by brothergrimm
texas our texas by jmtimages

Thing #9

Flickr

I am truly inspired! I've had an aha moment after completing the exercises is Thing #9. This whole time I've been thinking about setting up my class blog as basically a communication tool for my students' parents. After reading misterteacher's blog about using Flickr in the classroom, I've begun brainstorming ways to kick it up a notch. Following are just a few of the things I thought of while exploring Flickr...class blog...problem of the day with Flickr, journal entries, displaying student work, not just communicating "events" with parents, good for portfolios, principal access to student work, student of the week, photo story starters, photos describing books we read, character analysis, emotions, setting, theme...wow, the possibilites are overwhelming.

It's funny because just the other day I was thinking about how my blog posts on this blog are pretty boring visually compared to my personal blog and I kept thinking how I needed to go back and add some pics to this one. Now I have just the tool in which to do that.

Some of my searches included "Louisiana", "Louisiana_architecture" (because of my love for my home state), and many Texas themed searches as well because of teaching Texas history to my fourth graders. I couldn't help but think of a Texas ABC book and the endless possibilites with using photos from Flickr. Even a photographic field trip would be fun...or comparing point of view of photos...or even having students take on the point of view of the subject of a photo to write a short story...still brainstorming...

and off to add some photos to my previous posts...

Photo credit:
Inspire by Mark Brannan

Thing #8

Creative Commons

I had never even heard of Creative Commons until this class. I am curious to know how many other people had not heard of it either. I'd hate to think I was the only one living under a rock. I never have seen the CC logo on any websites, probably because I didn't know to look for it. Now I am sure I will see it all over the world wide web.

While browsing through the content directory of Creative Commons I stumbled across a few sites that gave me ideas for use in my classroom. The first was sketchory.com. I will need to explore it a little more for content, but I thought maybe I could try using some of the sketches as story starters for my fourth grade writers or even allow those artists that I always have each year to upload their own sketches to the site as a reward for completing other assignments. My students could even create their own sketches to add to our database of story starters.

I can see how students could search for work that is already part of Creative Commons and figure out ways to change the work to fit what they have learned. It might be a tool for guiding students to create games based on content that they have learned.

How great to be able to share and build upon work with others. What a great way for students to learn about collaboration and the way work is done in the "real world".

Thing #7

Commenting

I am a "lurker"! I admit that I enjoy reading blogs and comments of others, but when it comes to me sharing a comment...no way! I read this blog and some of the comments helped me to realize just how important commenting is. Already during this class, so many blogs have been beneficial to me, and in the "real world" what do I normally do when someone helps me? Say "thank you" and explain why and how they helped me. I suppose I can start there with my comments and then just maybe begin to express my own opinions and thoughts on certain topics within the blogs I read.

I'm off to some commenting...

I'm back from reading and commenting and realized how addictive it was to comment on others' blog postings. I began to find myself reading the blogs of other people who had left comments and wanting to comment on their blogs as well. Blogging truly is a network of "conversations" (and learning).

Thing #6

Google Reader

After cleaning out the 500-600 blogs, articles, and podcasts from my feeder (yes, overwhelming!), I have really enjoyed having my Google reader set up and can't wait to continue using it! I found a few interesting things that I may not have heard about if I had not begun using my Google reader.

The first two articles were"presidential" related items. The first was an article about George W. Bush and a "prized possession" from his term in office that may be included as an artifact in the Presidential Library at SMU. It was pretty interesting how the article described how he was so proud of this particular item. What a huge part of history.
The next "presidential" article caught my attention as a new mother struggling to balance work and family life. I think it did a great job describing the same battles being fought among the workers in The White House.

The next two items that caught my attention gave me ideas for lessons in my classroom. I teach 4th grade writing and want to learn more about Kidswrite which is what this article described. This blog led me to lessons on using Google search effectivley.

Then just for fun (and because I am a reality t.v. junkie) I found an article about the new show "NYC Prep". I've not watched this program and probably won't thanks to this article.

I've been checking my Google reader everyday and it does seem to get easier to steer away from trying to read everything!

I did set up a news search within my reader for "LSU", my alma mater, but haven't found anything that struck a chord with me...yet!