One More Thing

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

I found the Creative Commons study particularly useful and interesting. Livebinders was also particularly interesting.

How has this program affected your lifelong learning goals?

I am better schooled in tools related to online collaborative learning like Livebinders.

Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I expected to have heard of or used everything on this list, but was surprised to see how much there is out there.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

Some items could use some updating.  Also, some programs (like zoho) require credit card information to create a free trial, I was uncomfortable with this.

How will what you have learned influence your practice as a teacher?

I now have more resources that can be used for differentiating instruction. 

Thing #23

Creative Commons is an important ethical issue that one should definitely understand before modifying anything that they find online.  This “23 Things” assignment takes advantage of Creative commons quite often.  It is easy to find, at the bottom of several posts, attributions like this one:

(originally posted on Explore...Discover...Play: Learning 2.1 and used here under a Creative Commons license)

It is easy to anticipate the usefulness of Creative Commons in the classroom.  First, it seems to be an excellent way to bring the issue of plagiarism into the real-world for our students.  They may not be able to comprehend the ethical wrongness of copying someone’s homework, but they can probably comprehend how it would feel to have their artwork stolen on the internet.  Furthermore, Creative Commons allows students to use resources that they may not have been able to under normal copyright laws. 

Thing #22

Livebinders have the potential to be quite useful.  It seems like it would be a great addition to any webquest or an excellently efficient way to send multiple resources to students.  Students could even create their own binders to help keep research organized, something that would be especially helpful in group projects.  As well as creating their own binders, students can look at others’ research and use it to supplement their own.  For example, students working on a research project about Shakespeare and his times could look at this binder that I created:

                           

English Grammar LInks

 They might be assigned to look at the resources and evaluate them for relevance and appropriateness then be required to create a new binder of their own with only vetted resources that might be more appropriate for academic research.

Overall, an excellent resource. I highly recommend it.  

Thing #21

Create a wedding slideshow video at Animoto

Animoto was neat. In about five minutes I created a slideshow of a few of my wedding pictures that looks professionally done.  I think practical classroom use is limited, but it could be used to help build a classroom community by creating a “class video” of student pictures while working on projects and assignments or from field trips.  One unfortunate side-effect of animoto, however, is that it is not actually free.  If you want to make more than a thirty second video or use more than the most basic settings, then you have to pay for a subscription.  I wonder if there might be another tool out there that would perform a similar task for free.  

Thing #20

Youtube contains a plethora of useful educational videos—from tutorials to documentaries.  These videos work well for independent and extended learning activities as well as class instruction.  There is something much more powerful that comes from watching a video in which a scene of Shakespeare is acted out than there is that comes from simply reading the lines.  A video can work to bring any subject matter to life.  One thing that I do not like about youtube, however, is the number of advertisements that have popped up since google purchased the company, some of which are inappropriate for the classroom. Still, youtube is one Web 2.0 tool that is incredibly useful in any classroom. 

Thing #19

I am not a member of any of these communities and probably won’t use any of them regularly. While Gather might be interesting for its news resources, I am more a fan of Huffington Post for that purpose.  Any other features that these might have could be serviced using a free facebook account.  For example, while Ning is neat for being able to create your own social network, a facebook group would serve the same needs.  Perhaps one of these will be what replaces facebook when it goes the way of Myspace and Xanga. 

Thing #18

It is important for educators to be aware of social networks because our students will not only be aware of them, but they will be an inherent part of their lives. I often use facebook for connecting with other educators and finding out about resources that I can then apply in my classroom.  Not only are their countless groups for this purpose, but I can keep in touch with teachers that I meet at conferences and conventions to share ideas and strategies.  It is difficult to say whether Facebook or Twitter is more useful; it would depend on a person’s specific needs, but both have useful features.  I know that many educators use both facebook and twitter for classroom purposes, but I’m not sure that I would feel comfortable with the potential for private conversation.  I would much rather create a class blog on which any communication is public. 

Thing #17

Delicious was a neat site, though the concept of tagging has become very wide-spread so this was not as eye-opening as it could have been.  Tagging could be useful for students in terms of researching and other information gathering but I do not see the value in it past that.  In theory one could create a unique tag to have students find information but, this would be massively inefficient in comparison to a blog post.

Thing #16

I chose iGoogle because it was simple and efficient in terms of set-up.  It will probably not become my home page for a while because I use multiple things which I have not yet figured out how to set into iGoogle, however it is very useful (much like the RSS feeds). The online calendars could be useful, but, I found the process of adding tasks to be much more cumbersome than that of physical calendars. The to-do lists to me had the most potential, but are still not quite practical.  Perhaps when the time comes that I can fully integrate my  life with technology and be online everywhere with no inconvenience it will replace it’s physical predecessor.

Thing #15

Playing with the wiki was fun.  Particularly, I like that it allowed me to edit whatever I chose. However, I don’t see much practical classroom use for this tool.  While I could allow students to explore and share knowledge, giving a bunch of adolescents the ability to post freely and without censorship on the internet is a double-edged sword.

Thing #14

I chose to explore the tools Gliffy (flowchart) and Bubbl.us (mind map).  I found the flowchart easier to use (it took much longer than I would have liked to figure out the mind-mapping software.  Particularly, I liked the range of shapes available in flowcharts, which helped me track similar things (such as sorting males and females).  My only problem with Gliffy was that you could not bend a line to connect one point to multiple points in the next row very easily, nor could I find a way to build a line off of a line.

Thing #13

Having used Google docs before, I set out to explore Zoho.  It’s features seem comparable to Google docs, although I am not aware of whether Google docs can be synced with slideshare and other web 2.0 tools.  It is likely that I will stick with my familiar google docs, which I have already found useful in my limited teaching experience because it is already linked with my existing Google account.  I have loaded many writing resources, including the MLA template below and share with students no matter where I am or what software is on the computer that I must use.  Students can work collaboratively as well even outside of the classroom if they have access from home.